Posted on 02/06/2016 4:33:29 PM PST by COUNTrecount
For alumni of U.S. national-security departments and agencies, Clinton’s email saga is mind-numbing. The publicly available information makes clear she and her aides violated so many elementary security prohibitions that alumni are speechless. They wonder, had they done what she did, how quickly they would have lost their clearances and jobs and how extensive the criminal indictments against them would be.
By contrast, many who have never served in government or dealt with classified information see the affair as opaque, even overblown. Certainly Clinton has worked hard to foster that impression. Leaving political spin aside, without delving into arcane legal analysis, which is it? What did Clinton and her entourage actually do day-to-day, and what does it mean?
In hopes of making things a little clearer, herewith the observations of one State Department alumnus, who has pondered how he would look in an orange jumpsuit were he in Clinton's shoes.
State, like other national-security agencies, has both classified and unclassified ways for its employees, especially the most senior, to communicate. Clinton erred in two separate but often confused ways. First, she used private channels for official government business, and second, she used unclassified channels to send and receive classified information.
Her first error violates basic common sense, familiar to any private business: Business channels should be used for business purposes and personal channels for personal purposes. Obviously, there can be ambiguity between business and personal communications, such as one spouse asking another, "When will you be home for dinner?" But in Clinton's case, there seems to be no ambiguity: She simply did not use government channels for her electronic communications. Her motive was almost certainly to put information she alone deemed personal beyond government access, which is impermissible even for the most junior clerk, let alone the secretary of state.
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
Even the NYT (after burying this tidbit far down in a story about the email problem)finally stated the legal situation:
“According to the law and security procedures Mrs. Clinton agreed to follow when she became secretary, such material should not even have been sent over the State Department’s official but unclassified state.gov server.”
In a long article on Hillary’s email problem, even the NYT had to balance their bias in her favor with this item, buried far down in the article:
“According to the law and security procedures Mrs. Clinton agreed to follow when she became secretary, such material should not even have been sent over the State Department’s official but unclassified state.gov server.”
Case closed.
Tomatoe, tomahto.
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