As HotAir notes, a story emerged today that could be a potential bombshell in the investigation into Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. A direct order from Hillary to send a classified email via unsecured channels:
Has the State Department released a smoking gun in the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal? In a thread from June 2011, Hillary exchanges e-mails with Jake Sullivan, then her deputy chief of staff and now her campaign foreign-policy adviser, in which she impatiently waits for a set of talking points. When Sullivan tells her that the source is having trouble with the secure fax, Hillary then orders Sullivan to have the data stripped of its markings and sent through a non-secure channel.
That should be game, set, and match, yes?
“If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure.” That’s an order to violate the laws handling classified material. There is no other way to read that demand. Regardless of whether or not Sullivan complied, this demolishes Hillary’s claim to be ignorant of marking issues, as well as strongly suggests that the other thousand-plus instances where this did occur likely came under her direction.
How bad is this? At Townhall, Guy Benson notes:
Where to begin? Let’s start with the least serious revelation, and work our way up: (1) Hillary evinced surprise that a State Department underling had used his personal account to send an official email. How rich. Yes, the State Department had explicitly instructed employees to follow the rules and only use secure means to disseminate official information. State sanctioned at least one top diplomat for disregarding those rules. Mrs. Clinton may have been especially “surprised” at Godfrey’s actions because they came after she’d been issued a dire warning that foreign entities were aggressively targeting State Department officials’ personal, unsecure email accounts. But lest you need reminding, Hillary Clinton exclusively used such accounts to conduct all of her official business — via an improper, unsecure, private server — before and after this urgent red flag was brought to her attention.
(2) “Clinton…has repeatedly maintained that she did not send or receive classified material on her personal account.” This assertion has been disproven by the more than 1,000 classified emails discovered on her private server, including 66 additions from this batch alone. Her myriad excuses for this have been debunked piece by piece.
(3) Her final justification — which is legally irrelevant, as Hillary herself has personally attested — is that none of the sensitive material that she wrongfully transmitted through her unsecure server was “marked classified” at the time. Again, this is meaningless, especially when it comes to highly secret material that she was obligated to recognize and protect as soon as it was produced. But the email chain referenced above includes an instruction from Hillary Clinton to a State Department aide (who now works on her campaign) to strip classified information — it remains redacted to this day — of its classified markings [“identifying heading”] and “send nonsecure.
If this is as bad as it looks, Democrats may find themselves voting for an open socialist in Bernie Sanders for president. You know, that guy who said “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about” Hillary’s emails.
Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?
AAN Staff
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