Hillary: 'People in White House...Knew I Was Emailing From a Personal Account'

Jeffdunetz | September 9, 2015
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The news reports about Hillary Clinton's Tuesday interview with David Muir of ABC News were that she finally "apologized" for using a private email server. But, that was only a little piece of the story. What the mainstream media is missing is that, during the same discussion, Ms. Clinton said that "many" people in the White House knew that she was using a private email - and that she then proceeded to obfuscate about how emails are classified and why she had to know about the status of many of them.

Democratic Candidate for president Hillary Clinton agreed to a "no holds barred" interview with ABC World News Now host David Muir (the email section of the interview is embedded below).

The interview started with the topic of the home server-personal email scandal. After mentioning her sinking poll numbers and the recent Quinnipiac poll where voters said the first word that pops into their mind about Ms. Clinton was "liar," Muir asked if she thought that her original explanation for using the private server that she "did it to carry one phone out of convenience wasn't sitting well with the public."

Clinton admitted using the private server was wrong:

(...) certainly, as I look back at it now, even though it was allowed, I should've used two accounts. One for personal, one for work-related emails. That was a mistake. I'm sorry about that. I take responsibility. 

Muir followed up asking, "And so as you sit here, millions watching tonight, did you make a mistake?" Her answer began by saying that everyone knew, but no one tried to stop her:

"I did. I did. As I said, it was allowed and there was no hiding it. It was totally above board. Everybody in the government I communicated with -- and that was a lot of people-- knew I was using a personal e-mail. But I'm sorry that it has, you know, raised all of these questions. I do take responsibility for having made what is clearly not the best decision."

When Muir asked if those people who knew included cabinet members and the president, Hillary pounced on the opportunity:

"Everyone I emailed with, and I'm not going to go into names, but let me say I emailed with many people in the White House and the rest of the government, of course, across the State Department, knew that I was emailing from a personal account."

What the presumptive Democratic Party nominee was saying is that, since they all saw her email was not a State Department address, everyone who received an email from her should have known she was using a private email address.

The conversation then turned to the two emails which, according to intelligence inspectors general were labeled top secret (the highest level of security classification) BEFORE Ms. Clinton received them and remain so today. The former secretary of state claimed that the dispute over these emails is a matter of interpretation, sounding suspiciously like her husband's famous line, "it depends what is...is."

She said:

 Well, there is still, as you know, a dispute. The State Department disputes that. I understand why different agencies have different views and I respect that. It does not change the fact that I did not send or receive any information that was marked classified at the time.

(...) One, sometimes events do proceed in a way that maybe there's a case being brought against somebody. Maybe even a terrorist. And all of a sudden everything is classified until the trial attorneys go through it to figure out what should or shouldn't be public.

Maybe there is a backward-looking effort to see, okay, maybe that wasn’t classified. Or maybe that was unclassified on the State Department system. But we had it on a different system and we treated it differently. Something that we wouldn't have known about in the State Department. So--

The answer above is simply untrue.  The State Department had no say in whether or not the emails should have been, or should remain, top secret.

In December 2009, President Obama issued "Executive Order 13526-Classified National Security Information." The order had many different elements detailing who could, and who could not, classify information.  One of the provisions says that only the agencies who own that information in the first place have the authority to declassify it, and when it is declassified it has to be in writing.  

In other words, since those emails came from intelligence as top secret, no one in the State Department, including Mrs. Clinton, had the authority to change that classification, unless they received something in writing from the people who classified it saying it was no longer top secret. 

 

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