By Matthew Vadum ——Bio and Archives--July 28, 2015
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In a letter to members of Congress on Thursday, the inspector general of the intelligence community concluded that Mrs. Clinton’s email contains material from the intelligence community that should have been considered “secret”—the second-highest level of classification—at the time it was sent.The letter may be viewed at the WSJ's website. The four emails “were classified when they were sent and are classified now,” said Andrea Williams, a spokeswoman for the inspector general. Separately, federal watchdogs sent a memo to Patrick Kennedy, Under Secretary for Management at the State Department, indicating that a review of Hillary's emails revealed "hundreds of potentially classified emails within the collection.” The four emails in question surfaced when the inspector general examined a small sample of about 40 emails from Clinton's account. Another way of looking at it is to say that an appalling 10 percent of emails in the sample contained classified data, which foreign intelligence agencies or other hackers could have intercepted because Hillary's private email system lacked security safeguards. This raises the specter that there may be many more emails in the more than 30,000 being examined that could contain confidential, secret, or top-secret information and that may have been viewed by unauthorized individuals hostile to the United States. “None of the emails we reviewed had classification or dissemination markings, but some included IC-derived classified information and should have been handled as classified, appropriately marked, and transmitted via a secure network,” Inspector General I. Charles McCullough wrote in his letter to federal lawmakers. "The emails in question left government custody and are on both Mrs. Clinton’s personal home email sever as well as a thumb drive of David Kendall, Mrs. Clinton’s personal attorney," the WSJ reported. As Clinton watchers might expect, Hillary brushed off the news of a probe into her behavior in office as unimportant. Forever the victim, she claimed Friday that there were “inaccuracies” in reports about her use of email, but failed to elaborate. She said she voluntarily handed over 55,000 pages of email and has agreed to make herself available to testify before lawmakers. “Maybe the heat is getting to everybody,” the presidential candidate said flippantly. “We are all accountable to the American people to get the facts right, and I will do my part. But I’m also going to stay focused on the issues, particularly the big issues that really matter to American families.” A State Department spokesman feebly protested that the agency didn't believe any emails Hillary sent during her time as secretary contained any information that was classified at the material time. “To our knowledge, none of them needed to be classified at the time,” Mark Toner said. He acknowledged the department has since determined that many of Hillary's emails contained classified data but State did not believe at the time that it was classified. But even this is no excuse. As secretary of state it was Clinton's duty to ensure that her emails, communications that were vital to national security and intelligence-related and diplomatic operations around the world, were totally secure. Even if she didn't know at the time that the information she was emailing was classified or worthy of classification, it was her job to protect the information over which she had control. She has maintained throughout the email saga that she never sent classified information through email. The referral of the case to the Department of Justice comes as the Clinton camp and congressional investigators get closer to ironing out the ground rules for the former secretary of state's testimony before the Benghazi Select Committee. Clinton aides say her testimony is expected to take place on Oct. 22. This lengthy delay would give the committee enough time to review thousands of pages of Clinton's State Department aides' emails and to interview those aides. The testimony would be public which Clinton's politically tone-deaf handlers think would be advantageous for her. Amazingly, Clinton strategists think her temper tantrum before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Jan. 23, 2013 was good for her image. That was when she theatrically screamed for the TV cameras:
With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?It certainly made a difference to Clinton during the terrorist assault in Libya almost three years ago. The Benghazi attack was inconvenient for President Obama who had boasted that Islamic terrorists were on the run, so his people engineered the Benghazi coverup to get President Obama safely reelected in November 2012. Around the time of the attack Clinton scapegoated U.S.-based Mark Basseley Youssef (formerly known as Nakoula Basseley Nakoula), the director of Innocence of Muslims, an anti-Islam movie trailer on YouTube that almost nobody had seen. She claimed back then that the video inspired the sophisticated military-style operation that she claimed materialized spontaneously outside the facility which was in Islamist-held territory. At the military ceremony that accompanied the repatriation of the body of Tyrone Woods, a retired Navy SEAL who perished fighting off Islamists in the 2012 attack, Clinton blamed all the death and mayhem of that awful day on Youssef, who ended up going to jail as a real-life political prisoner. She promised the dead hero's grieving father, Charles Woods, that Youssef who was thousands of miles away from Benghazi at the time, would pay for whatever it was he had done. “She came over…she talked with me. I gave her a hug and shook her hand and she did not appear to be one bit sincere at all and she mentioned about, ‘We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video,’” Woods recounted to talk radio host Lars Larson. “That was the first time I even heard about anything like that.” Chances are Hillary Clinton, whose poll numbers are fading under withering attack by self-described socialist Bernie Sanders, is going to feel the heat when she testifies on Oct. 22, offering a helpful reminder to American voters that she is a pathological, self-serving liar who doesn't mind if Americans die to further her political ambitions. Whether her testimony helps to sink her bid to return to the White House remains to be seen.
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Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
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