Clinton Emails Were Born Classified

By: American Decency Staff

My column on the home-page today is a refutation of the laughable defense of Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information offered by the former Obama-appointed U.S. attorney who gave David Petraeus a sweetheart misdemeanor plea deal over his mishandling of classified information … and who is now a donor to Clinton’s presidential campaign.

In it, I make a point that our friend Shannen Coffin nailed last night on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News program: Mrs. Clinton’s claim that she was unaware that many of her emails contained classified information is untenable – in fact, it is remarkable that she and her pom-pom squad (to say nothing of Obama administration officials) dare to make it with a straight face.

Clinton rationalizes that because the emails were not stamped classified, she could not have been expected to know they were classified. As I’ve been emphasizing since March, she is trying to exploit the public’s unfamiliarity with the distinction between classified documents and classified information – the former are obviously classified because they are marked as such; the latter, because of its nature, is well known to national security officials to be classified – regardless of whether it is marked as such or even written down at all.

Now, we have an easily understandable demonstration of this distinction – and, hence, of Mrs. Clinton’s undeniable knowledge that she was pervasively exchanging classified information over her private email system.

In the first year of his administration (December 29, 2009, to be exact), President Obama issued Executive Order 13526, entitled “Classified National Security Information.” It explains that information is deemed classified if its disclosure would cause “damage to the national security.” Beyond that, whether the classified information is categorized as “top secret,” “secret,” or “confidential” depends on how serious the damage would be.

With that as background, the order makes clear that there is one category of information that is automatically deemed classified: information from foreign governments. Section 1.1(d) of the executive order decrees: “The unauthorized disclosure of foreign government information is presumed to cause damage to the national security.”



Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/423362/clinton-emails-were-born-classified-andrew-c-mccarthy

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