State Department finds 60 more Hillary e-mails with classified data

So says the Washington Times, based on sources within the State Department. In a real way, though, we already knew this:

While media coverage has focused on a half-dozen of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s personal emails containing sensitive intelligence, the total number of her private emails identified by an ongoing State Department review as having contained classified data has ballooned to 60, officials told The Washington Times.

That figure is current through the end of July and is likely to grow as officials wade through a total of 30,000 work-related emails that passed through her personal email server, officials said. The process is expected to take months.

The 60 emails are among those that have been reviewed and cleared for release under the Freedom of Information Act as part of a open-records lawsuit. Some of the emails have multiple redactions for classified information.

Among the first 60 flagged emails, nearly all contained classified secrets at the lowest level of “confidential” and one contained information at the intermediate level of “secret,” officials told the Times.

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The level of classification doesn’t actually matter, at least legally speaking. Politically speaking, having Top Secret/compartmented data among that found on Hillary Clinton’s server makes it clear that Hillary’s decision to use an unauthorized private e-mail server for official business and locating it in an unsecured and unauthorized location — her house — was at a bare minimum gross negligence in her duty to protect classified material. That’s all that’s needed for a criminal charge under 18 USC 793 (f)(1), and for that matter, the material doesn’t even need to be classified for that to apply. Possession of such data without authorization is prosecutable under 18 USC 1924, which does specify that material has to be classified — but at any level, including Confidential.

However, anyone following the release of Hillary’s e-mails by State, which was ordered to publish them by a judge in a FOIA case, could tally these violations for themselves. Dozens of e-mails had redactions accompanied by classification markings, making for further violations of both 18 USC 793 (regarding transmission) and 18 USC 1924. As I noted in the previous release, any redaction at all would be evidence of violation of the law, especially 18 USC 793, even those not specifically marked as classified. We have talked mainly about the TS/compartmented e-mails, but every single one of these is a violation that could result in loss of clearance, termination, and/or prosecution.  The Washington Times is just updating the scorecards.

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And those are definitely just updates. There are 30,000+ e-mails that State and intelligence IGs have to inspect, and at this rate we’ll see that number go up into the hundreds. For anyone else, this would already have produced criminal charges, not jokes on the campaign trail.

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David Strom 4:40 PM | February 13, 2025
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David Strom 2:00 PM | February 13, 2025
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