The Patriot Post® · Hillary May Need the Classified Ads

Hillary Clinton’s email troubles continue to abound, as the State Department dumped its next batch of nearly 7,000 pages of her emails Monday. For the last several months she has been dodging questions from reporters, blaming Republicans for trying to distract the American people from more important issues and, well, doing everything she can to prevent the facts from revealing her life of corruption. But oh, those pesky facts have been and are surfacing and her high hopes of being the Democrat nominee for president are fading — although not as fast as many would like to see.

Recall that she claimed, “I did not email any classified material to anyone in my email,” and, “There is no classified material” on her server. That’s a pretty hard lie to buy. As the former secretary of state, she had to have known that it was a violation of federal law to use her own private email server. She either thinks that she is above the law or she has outright lied to try to cover up any communication that was classified.

Why would it be necessary to erase 30,000 emails from a server if there was nothing to hide?

After Hillary turned over printed copies of some of her emails in a phony attempt at transparency, the State Department has been releasing them in batches. The emails date back to 2009 and, indeed, at least 150 classified messages were found on her account.

Late Monday night, the State Department released an additional 7,000 pages of emails and found that more than 150 additional emails containing classified information. Moreover, the inspector general of the intelligence community previously stated that “at least two emails on Clinton’s account contained ‘top secret’ information,” which is “subject to special protection because it was derived from electronic or aerial surveillance.” This is not quite the record of performance that Americans expect from a high-level government official. Worse, it isn’t just a mistake that it happened.

According to Willes Lee, a former operations officer for the U.S. Army in Europe, “It is hard to move classified documents into the non-classified system. You couldn’t move a document by mistake.” Further, State Department spokesmen Alec Gerlach notes that the two systems don’t connect. “The classified and unclassified systems are separate and you cannot email between the two.”

One of Clinton’s defenses has been that the emails in question made it to her server as unclassified but were “subsequently upgraded” to classified. Oh really?

Bradford Higgins, who served as assistant secretary of state for resource management and chief financial officer from 2006-2009, is quite skeptical of Clinton’s assertion. He accurately insists, “Emails don’t change from unclassified to classified. The originator of the email decides the classification of email before it is sent out based on basic protocols, not subsequent readers. … It would be highly unusual for an unclassified email to later become classified.”

Further, Higgins notes that it’s unusual for State Department personnel to use thumb drives, or any external hard drive at all, because it would defeat the purpose of having a top secret computer, a classified printer or a Sensitive Compartment Information Facility (SCIF). In that secret facility, nothing electronic can go in or out except over secure lines of communication. He doesn’t even recall that the classified systems even have ports for thumb drives.

The revelation thus far from the ongoing investigation may seem confusing but in reality it’s pretty clear. The classified information that has been discovered on her personal server has huge implications for national security. “Everything on her server has been compromised” says Higgins.

But remember her insistence that “there is no classified email.” If the current FBI investigation proves what most analysts already assume, then Clinton should be severely punished for being in complete violation of the section of the Espionage Act known as 18 US Code 793.

Even the slightest mishandling of information is punishable by law, not only in the government sector, but the civilian sector as well. People have been fired, fined, had clearances stripped and been jailed for lesser mishandling of information. And in Clinton’s case it wasn’t a mistake.

Lately, she has been wasting her time chastising Republicans and conservatives for playing politics, smearing them as terrorists and Nazis. But we’ve seen this tactic of deflection commonly used by government officials (especially Clintons) past and present, most of whom are Democrats who cry foul when their lies and corruption are brought to light.

The fact that she is still campaigning for president is outrageous. If any Republican candidate had been involved even remotely in a scandal such as this, they would have been out of the race by now due to the demonization from the Leftmedia. But not Clinton. No, why spoil the chance for the possibility of the first (Democrat) woman president?

As more information is revealed, it might be a good idea for Clinton to start scheduling more high-dollar speech venues — because she’s going to pay a hefty price for defense lawyers. Her get-out-of-jail-free card won’t be available. And maybe, just maybe, we will see the justice system work the way it is supposed to.