Hillary Clinton wrote 104 of the classified emails on her private server

The latest deep dive into the bowels of Hillary Clinton’s private email server have turned up one statistic which was previously unavailable for public discussion. Much of the material found among the thousands of classified documents was sent to the former Secretary of State by others… frequently her closest aides, but sometimes coming from lower level diplomats, other people at State or occasionally by outsiders with no US security clearance at all. But how many of them was Clinton personally responsible for creating or editing and hitting the Send button?

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The WaPo has done the digging for us this time and the answer comes up to 104.

Hillary Clinton wrote 104 emails that she sent using her private server while secretary of state that the government has since said contain classified information, according to a new Washington Post analysis of Clinton’s publicly released correspondence…

In roughly three-quarters of those cases, officials have determined that material Clinton herself wrote in the body of email messages is classified. Clinton sometimes initiated the conversations but more often replied to aides or other officials with brief reactions to ongoing discussions…

The Post analysis is based on an examination of the 2,093 chains of Clinton’s email correspondence that the State Department decided contained classified information. The agency released 52,000 pages of Clinton’s emails as part of a court-ordered process but blocked the sensitive information from public view. The Post identified the author of each email that contained such redactions.

The analysis raises difficult questions about how the government treats sensitive information. It suggests that either material is being overclassified, as Clinton and her allies have charged, or that classified material is being handled improperly with regularity by government officials at all levels — or some combination of the two.

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What’s missing from this analysis is the status of the 22 Top Secret emails which will almost surely never see the light of day.

As the Post takes great pains to point out, these 104 documents shoot holes in Clinton’s repeated claims that she never put any classified material on the server herself, but simply received it from others. That shouldn’t make any difference at all, since she was responsible for the existence of the server in the first place and was the owner of the contents. Further, the analysis repeats Clinton’s long discredited claim that the material wasn’t classified at the time it was originally sent, with those labels being attached later. This too carries no weight in the discussion, since every intelligence official who has been asked about the subject agrees that it is the content of the communications which are classified whether it has a label or not. Further, federal law states that it’s the responsibility of the creator or owner to ensure that any such material is properly labeled and stored.

In the end, of course, none of this is going to matter if the Justice Department refuses to do anything about it once the FBI and various other IG offices have finished their investigations. But the embarrassment will weigh heavily on both the Obama presidency and the Clinton campaign if another high profile case against a Democrat is simply flushed down the memory hole for political convenience.

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Hillary shrugs

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David Strom 3:20 PM | November 15, 2024
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