Fact Checker: How did ‘top secret’ emails end up on Hillary Clinton’s server?

[cali]

Many readers continue to ask questions about Hillary Clinton’s private email setup and whether she mishandled classified information. We have looked at this issue in the past, but the reader interest spiked again after the revelation that seven email chains contained “top secret” information and would not be released.

As the saga has dragged on, Clinton’s terminology has become ever more nuanced. When she first discussed her private-email arrangement in detail last March, her staff distributed a Q&A that flatly stated that no classified material was sent or received by Clinton at her private email address. Now she says the emails were not marked classified: “When you receive information, of course, there has to be some markings, some indication that someone down the chain thought that this was classified and that was not the case.”

Clinton has come under fire for using a private email address during her time as secretary of state. The emails are being screened and released in batches. Here are some things we’ve learned from them.
In the ABC News interview, she cited the opinion of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee: “There is no classified marked information on those emails, sent or received by me. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking member of the intelligence committee, who’s had a chance to review them, has said that this email chain did not originate with me and that there were no classification markings.” (Feinstein did release such a statement.)

So what’s going on here?

The Facts

The nondisclosure agreement

Clinton did sign a Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement, in which she pledged to safeguard classified information whether “marked or unmarked classified information, including oral communications,” as defined by Executive Order 12958.


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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/02/04/how-did-top-secret-emails-end-up-on-hillary-clintons-server/

[Cali_Democrat]

1. ...

“When you receive information, of course, there has to be some markings, some indication that someone down the chain thought that this was classified and that was not the case.”

[OrwellwasRight]

20. As Secretary of State,

If you know your job, you know what discussions you are having are classified, often because you made the decisions about which topics are classified. That's just a fact.

[TwilightGardener]

2. There's a Repub Congressman insinuating that she had on her top secret emails

some names, methods, etc. that would have been clearly classified at least top secret at the time. We will have to see if that is correct.

[HassleCat]

3. Catch 22

Or something close to a catch 22. The "intelligence community" is very sloppy about correctly marking classified material. I don't know when they changed the rules, but the originator was responsible for correctly classifying messages back when I dealt with classified stuff. Now it seems they can just put it out there and somebody else is supposed to figure out it's classified, and the correct level of classification.

[Kelvin Mace]

13. Here's the problem

Even if she did not do anything wrong as regards to "classified" materials, she made a decision to have an email server where it NEVER should have been. There are only three possible explanations for this I can think of:

1) She is stunningly ignorant of the law.

2) She knew, but didn't care, and is thus willfully negligent.

3) She knew, but was trying to hide something.

Any of these disqualify her for president.

If there is another possible explanation, I would love to hear it.

[HassleCat]

18. "All the other kids have them!"

I don't know if this is true, or if it constitutes an excuse, but it seems to be (or have been) common practice.

[Kelvin Mace]

19. See my points above...

And I don't know a mother on the planet who has ever accepted "Well, everyone else is doing it." as an excuse.

[NCTraveler]

4. Bwahahaha

Some are now even saying "a republican said" in order to keep this alive. Or even shadier, not that they said, but simply might have insinuated.

Bring it. Bullshit right wing deception always benefits the Clintons in the end.

[cali]

6. Silly, but even sillier are people who think this is a dead issue

It will be a big messy issue in the general

[NCTraveler]

7. I don't think it is a dead issue.

It is right wing deception that always benefits the Clintons in the end. Been around long enough that I've seen it before. That is why I laugh and say bring it. This isn't my first rodeo. Right wing deception like this is the Clintons best friend. Democrats have seen it directed at Clinton for decades and aren't stupid enough to fall for it. Not only that, it draws all but conservatives into her corner.

[Yurovsky]

21. The Obama-appointed IG is a Republican?

Ok... Sounds legit...

Hillary has struggled with the truth her entire career. The cattle futures fiasco is a good example. Her broker "parked" futures trades so that her $1,000 magically turned into $100,000 at a point when the Clintons were trying to hustle up some cash by any means necessary. Of course, her explanation for her inexplicable novice-trading prowess was that she had read the Wall Street Journal.

Well, at least she didn't try to tell us she stayed in a Holiday Inn Express.

[MineralMan]

8. Lots of documents are classified after the fact.

Stuff that isn't marked often gets classified at some point after it is created. How that happens depends on the organization. At the NSA, where I worked while serving in the USAF, the rule was, more or less: If it exists, it's classified. It might get unclassified at some point, but it's basically classified when created. All of my work product there was created on paper that had Top Secret printed at the top of every page by default, regardless of what was in the document.

That rule doesn't necessarily apply everywhere. In emails, especially, a person might write something and transmit it without marking it with any classification. Later, someone else might decide that it should be classified. It's the information in whatever is written that determines the classification.

Bottom line is that a lot of communications at a place like the State Department contain content that probably should be classified. However, with emails, there's a good chance that the original writer might not recognize the need for classification. In those cases, the email might well be delivered with no classification notice.

Whether such an email gets classified or not depends on a lot of things. Did someone pay attention to the email? Did that person recognize that it contained classifiable information? I don't know about anyone else, but I ignore more email than I read closely. I receive a lot of email that I read only in a cursory way.

I expect that is what happened here with those emails that are now recognized as needing to be classified. I can't say for sure, of course, because I don't know the content in those emails.

Classification of documents is not an exact science. That much I do know, and from experience.

[Wilms]

11. Understood. So would it not make sense to handle everything as though it is classified?

[MineralMan]

12. Well, perhaps. I don't know, really.

I'm not privy to the communications Hillary Clinton received when she was Secretary of State. I also don't know how much attention she paid to any given email she received. Should everything sent to her have been classified? I can't answer that question, really. I've never worked at the State Department.

I do know this, though: Probably cabinet level officials actually read very little of what is sent to them. That's been my experience with executive types.

And then there are the more common emails, like: "Don't forget your meeting with the Ambassador of Belgium tomorrow at 11 A.M." I don't think those needed to be classified. I'm sure she got lots and lots of emails like that, too.

[NorthCarolina]

9. How did they retrieve these emails anyway since she wiped her server?

She needs better IT people.

[MineralMan]

10. The cloth she used to wipe her server was

apparently not as absorbent as she thought, perhaps.

[liberal N proud]

15. :O

[winter is coming]

14. Maybe her IT person is better than we know.

Maybe they did a thorough wipe of stuff she really didn't want seen, then did a quick-and-dirty wipe of everything else.

[-none]

17. The E-mails would also reside on the computers/servers of the people she communicated with.

Deleting E-Mails does not delete them from the trash or from any backups made. People have a tendency not to empty the trash for various reasons.

[Fawke Em]

23. Nothing is ever completely destroyed on a computer or server unless you rip the

motherboard out and beat it with a hammer.

Seriously - you can always retrieve data.

Here's an example: http://www.storagecraft.com/blog/data-recovery-forensic-technology-can-cant/

[-none]

16. All government E-mails sent from and to other government computers are behind firewalls and on the

government's own internet system.

E-mails sent to and received from computers outside the government firewalls and/or sent to and from people outside the government, are normally sent in the clear at least part of the way on the normal Internet system. They are taking a chance of these E-mails residing on one or more servers serving the public somewhere along the way.
Unless Hillary took steps to put her E-mail server behind a government firewall, she is guilty of a security breach because the job Hillary had, normally dealt with classified information, with various security levels. The fact there is no evidence of her E-mail server being hacked, does not enter into this at all.
Did she, or did she not have her private E-mail server behind any government firewall? I'm thinking not, as she knows nothing of computers and nothing has been said to address this point, as far as I know.

[Fawke Em]

22. A security review?

And she's going off on "they did it, too," which doesn't matter to me or anyone else in the cyber security industry. Perhaps the FBI will expand their investigation to include Rice and Powell, too, but that's not our call. If they do, then they do. Right now, only Clinton is under investigation, which is far more than a security review.

My company does security reviews, but we don't have the authority to recommend criminal charges.

[AtomicKitten]

24. an immaculate download?

k/r