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As my colleague, Leon Wolf, pointed out yesterday, Hillary can’t rationally claim to not have sent classified material when she either knew or, due to a senior moment, should have known she was creating a classified document.
Hillary’s defense, thus far, has revolved around two points. First, that she did not send or receive material that was marked as classified using her off-the-wall and highly unsecure private email server. This, of course, is a lawyer’s quibble. We know that the information sent to her had security classifications stripped from it before transmission and it beggars the imagination to be asked to believe Hillary was such a lackwit that she couldn’t identify material classified as TOP SECRET. Her second defense is that the emails released now have classified information in them but this is a technicality. State cleared the information and the Intelligence Community disagrees. So it is just a bureaucratic kerfuffle, a bunch of security geeks engaged in comparing penis size.
Wait. Not so fast, says the Washington Post:
While she was secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote and sent at least six e-mails using her private server that contained what government officials now say is classified information, according to thousands of e-mails released by the State Department.
Although government officials deemed the e-mails classified after Clinton left office, they could complicate her efforts to move beyond the political fallout from the controversy. They suggest that her role in distributing sensitive material via her private e-mail system went beyond receiving notes written by others, and appears to contradict earlier public statements in which she denied sending or receiving e-mails containing classified information.
The classified e-mails, contained in thousands of pages of electronic correspondence that the State Department has released, stood out because of the heavy markings blocking out sentences and, in some cases, entire messages.
The State Department officials who redacted the material cited national security as the reason for blocking it from public view.
This dovetails with another email released yesterday. The set up, Thomas Shannon, then-Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, is asked about his response and recommendation on how to proceed on some subject dealing with the Organization of American States. We don’t know what he said because it is redacted under FOIA Exemption b(5) which is the “you can’t see it because we say you can’t see it” exemption that the Obama administration is very fond of. The message is “Sensitive But Unclassified.” The subject changes to a statement by Tony Blair (I think on this but I can’t be sure).
Jake Sullivan, a member of Clinton’s inner circle tells Hillary that the statement she wants in inside the classified system and the “Ops” staff need to extract it for him. (This is the way the system should work.) Clinton says “F*** that noise, send it.” (Or words to that effect.) Sullivan, at this time on the job less than a year, demurs. Later on, the classified Blair statement arrives and Hillary snarks:
What this demonstrates is two things. Hillary Clinton had contempt for the system of protecting classified material. It is easy to develop such a contempt because you look at a lot of the stuff and say “huh?” Senior officials are the most prone to having this attitude because just like professional ball players, they tend to have an entitlement complex and haven’t been told ‘no’ in recent memory. The second thing it demonstrates is that at some point the State Department classified material custodians were compromised by pressure from Clinton delivered via her inner circle to circumvent the classified system. This explains how classified material, including satellite imagery, showed up in Hillary’s unclassified email system.
The dam is breaking. The major media, the media that tells the democrat establishment what to think, is coming to the conclusion that Hillary Clinton acted either recklessly or with deliberate criminality in her handling of classified material. At a minimum they are adding more evidence to support the perception held by about 2/3 of Americans that she is untrustworthy and couldn’t recognize the truth if it leapt out of the tall grass and bit her ample pant-suited ass.
The post The Washington Post calls bull***t on Hillary’s email excuses appeared first on RedState.