There is Confidential, Secret and Top Secret.
That’s it.
“Above Top Secret” is an invention.
It is TS with caveates, but it is still Top Secret.
Confidential is a classification level that is not Secret.
Reporters and obummer, and others should know better—they are trying to mitigate Hitlery’s guilt.
They think of secret as the broad classification of everything that the government doesn't want to disclose. They are surprised and even shocked to hear of the different gradients of classification and that "above Top Secret" only exists in cheap spy novels and in the movies.
It may be worth mentioning "For Official Use Only" is also a method of controlling information. FOUO is unclassified information that when associated with other unclassified information, could allow deduction of classified plans or actions.
Given the administration's ignorance of such matters, I believe that FOUO is truly the category they think they are trying to eliminate.
You nailed their motive too, to bail out the hildabeast.
“There is Confidential, Secret and Top Secret.
That’s it.
“Above Top Secret” is an invention.
It is TS with caveates, but it is still Top Secret.”
Well, there is SCI which is an ad hoc subset of Top Secret, as you suggest. I had only a Secret clearance, so I never got close to anything that was SCI, but I knew some people with a TS clearance who occasionally had to read such material in a windowless room with an armed guard inside the room. They signed in and out and were prohibited from taking notes.
In the olden days (of paper), Secret documents were logged in, and tracked. When audited, you had to produce it. Had to get permission to make a copy, which was logged in.
Not so for Confidential.
This went away with computers and classified networks.