http://www.nationalreview.com/node/436468/print The Facts Keep Undermining Hillary’s E-mail Tales
It’s outrageous that she might emerge unscathed even so.
By David French — June 10, 2016
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal revealed that the FBI’s criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information was zeroing in on “a series of e-mails between American diplomats in Islamabad and their superiors in Washington about whether to oppose specific drone strikes in Pakistan.” The Journal noted that the e-mails were “vaguely worded” and sent within the “often-narrow time frame” when State Department officials had an opportunity to object to CIA drone strikes.
Before we go on, let’s revisit Clinton’s words from August 26, 2015. Back then, she declared that, “I did not send classified material and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified, which is the way you know whether something is.”
This was a classic Clintonian defense, resting as it did on a largely irrelevant straw man – if she did not receive information “marked” or “designated” classified, and such designations are “the way you know” something is classified, then she never knowingly mishandled classified information. Yet as I (and many others) have pointed out before, Clinton’s actual legal obligation was to safeguard marked and unmarked classified information, and to fulfill that obligation she would necessarily have to know the classification of everything she handled, whether it was marked or not.
That isn’t always a particularly difficult task. When it comes to drone strikes and many other sensitive issues, it is remarkably easy to determine whether information is or should be classified. And as you read the Journal article, it becomes quite clear that all parties knew drone-strike information was classified, yet they were doing their best to evade classification requirements for the sake of speed and convenience.
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