Samples of email found on the thumbdrive were indeed "TOP SECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN" per Intelligence Community’s Inspector General, Charles McCullough. I'll take his word over any lawyer or talking head.
I don’t generally make a practice of reposting previous responses. But I’m doing so here because I think we are being misled about the classified contents of found in Hillary’s email files. Speculation is morphing into “facts”.
We need to be careful about what we claim to be true and what is really true about these classified documents. At this point we know very little about the contents of those emails beyond the fact that an Inspector General from the Intelligence Community has declared two of them to to be TS and SCI to boot. Personally I trust the judgement of that IG. I believe he has made the right call. There are highly classified documents on the Hillary server.
But we should not extend that belief to blindly accepting the idea that classified documents were scanned, markings removed and emailed to Hillary. There is simply no proof of that.
Here is my previous on the subject:
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I really think that there is a major misunderstanding of what is being referred to as “classified information” in the news reports.
Here is what I believe is the reality:
1. There will be no instances found of actually scans of classified documents found in any of the files, even those that have been erased if they are recovered. Remember, Hillary had a lawyer and presumably her close associates go through those documents looking for sensitive information. They would not have missed a document marked TOP SECRET. Nor would scans of any level of classified documents been missed. Just not possible.
2. Therefore the idea that “Top Secret” and similar markings were removed by some unknown entity is not going to be found either. That has been nothing but MSM speculation right from the get-go.
3. What will be found is the inadvertent disclosure of highly classified material as part of the normal conversation that goes on in any email. In the case in question those conversations just naturally involved matters related to the highest levels of National Security.
For example assume that Huma and Hillary and Cheryl are discussing news reports that detail a program where drones are collecting images of Pakistani nuclear storage facilities.
Assume that Huma or Hillary or Cherly makes the seemingly innocuous comment: “How in the heck did they find out about that?”
She has just divulged Top Secret information by in effect confirming the existence of the surveillance program
Those messages aren’t just there or not there. If they were sent, the sender has a record of the transaction, including the address the message was sent to. If the message was sent to clintonemail.com, that means the sender had vetted the recipient as safe to send top secret content to. In turn that means that someone lied about the security of the receiving server, or the sender violated strict protocols. SOMEONE is going to prison over this.
Samples of email found on the thumbdrive were indeed "TOP SECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN" per Intelligence Community’s Inspector General, Charles McCullough. I'll take his word over any lawyer or talking head.