Hillary spokesman: She was a "passive recipient of unwitting information that subsequently became classified"

I’m going to try to translate this from Clintonese: Not only did her private server hold classified material, she personally received classified material in her e-mail account on that server. And if that’s true, if that’s what this is supposed to mean, then it makes her mishandling of classified info even more egregious. It wasn’t just a matter of Huma Abedin or whoever sending classified material through the server unbeknownst to poor, dumb, innocent Hillary. Hillary actually saw some of the material herself. But wouldn’t you know it, being dumb and innocent, she couldn’t recognize it for what it was.

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She didn’t know it was classified because it wasn’t marked ‘n stuff — which is irrelevant for legal purposes, and which sidesteps the fact that it may well be that her own aides removed the markings so that she could play dumb and innocent in the first place. But this shtick, that she simply didn’t know the material was classified, will help her among voters who want to see this fiasco more as a matter of negligence and incompetence than willful mishandling of state secrets. That’s what the instantly famous line at her presser yesterday about wiping her server “with a cloth” was all about too. The dumber grandma seems about tech stuff, the easier it is to chalk all of this up to ignorance rather than deliberate malfeasance.

Further to that point, here’s another spokesman, Jennifer Palmieri, shrugging off Hillary’s fateful decision to set up a private e-mail server in the first place as one she “didn’t really think … through.” You buy that, don’t you? An incoming Secretary of State, knowing that she’d routinely be accessing the most sensitive state secrets, was never warned by any trusted allies in the legal or tech fields that a private server would be much less secure than the government’s system and that transmitting classified material on it would be a serious criminal matter. Deciding to go off the federal communications grid as a cabinet member is something that anyone could have done absentmindedly, with no eye to the consequences for national security. That’s what The Smartest Woman In The World’s reduced to arguing.

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Exit question from the tweet above: What exactly is “unwitting information”?

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