Brookings Institute: Hillary's classified e-mails: Much ado about nothing (most likely)
This article is long but all should read and pass around (very readable).
Richard Lempert | August 13, 2015 11:00am
Hillary's classified e-mails: Much ado about nothing (most likely)
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/fixgov/posts/2015/08/13-hillary-clinton-classified-emails-lempert?cid=00900015020089101US0001-08231
.....We may never know what the messages labeled Secret and Top Secret on Clinton’s server contained, and without this knowledge, we have no way of knowing whether the presence of classified information on Clinton’s personal server is reason to question Clinton’s e-mail practices or judgment. Critiques based on this information are for the moment pure speculation. They are also unrelated to questions surrounding Clinton’s use of a personal server. Had Clinton sent or received emails containing Secret or Top Secret information using the State Department’s unsecured network, the issues, including any potential violations of rules regarding the transmittal of classified information, would be exactly the same.
Two other points deserve mention, not because of their implications for Clinton’s honesty but for their bearing on a larger issue: whether Clinton’s comingling of official and private messages on a personal server created risks that would have been absent had she used a government e-mail system for business-related transmissions. We may in the future learn more about this, for Clinton has agreed to give her server to the FBI for an assessment of its security. Most likely there were risks in using a personal server, but it is also likely that the risks were not realized, and it is quite possible that the risks were no greater, and perhaps less, than they would have been had Clinton used a State Department server. Clinton, no doubt, had firewalls and other protections in place to guard her personal server, and it is likely that she only discussed sensitive topics with people whose discretion she could trust since she could be damaged politically by any untoward revelations. As for the risk of being hacked, the wave of hacked government sites and the betrayals of Bradley Manning and Eric Snowden mean it is not silly to think that using a privately protected, unadvertised server could have made Clinton’s e-mails less vulnerable to surreptitious acquisition than they would have been on a State Department server, which is most likely a regular target of attempted intrusions.
Understanding how the government's security system works, provides further reason to see the House Benghazi Committee's desire to secure Clinton's private server as a smoke screen for a politically-motivated hatchet job. Clinton’s private server e-mails are unlikely to shed any new light on what happened in Benghazi, or on her activities while the struggle was ongoing and in its immediate aftermath. Pertinent messages by or to Clinton and her staff that were marked Secret or Top Secret and are likely the most informative would have been sent through secure government channels, and confidential post-mortem analyses will be still classified. These may be provided to the Committee by the government if the law requires it, but there is no reason to expect to find them stored on Clinton’s private e-mail server. What would have been found there before Clinton destroyed her personal e-mails are likely messages revealing little or nothing about what happened in Benghazi but perhaps revealing Clinton’s circle of close confidents, or comments and disclosures that might be politically embarrassing and harmful to Clinton’s presidential ambitions. If contemporary politics were such that the House Committee could be trusted to reveal nothing on Clinton’s server except Benghazi-related messages, its demand to access the server before messages were destroyed would have deserved respectful consideration. But if we lived in that political world, investigations into Benghazi would have long since ceased, or if they were somehow still ongoing, the Committee would have had no interest in searching the totality of Clinton’s personal communications.
Destroying her personal emails does not, however, protect Clinton from the political consequences of mixing government and personal email on a personal server. Just as her supporters are likely to accept her claim that she only destroyed personal messages, and to be convinced that the Benghazi Committee could not have been trusted to keep personal information confidential, her opponents are unlikely to believe that only personal messages were destroyed. Rather, they will see in their claimed destruction a subterfuge designed to cover up the deletion of messages showing malfeasance in Clinton’s handling of Benghazi or other damning revelations about her performance while Secretary of State. The next Presidential election may be determined by whichever side is best able to persuade the broader American public that its convictions are right. The issue of Clinton’s honesty should not, however, be confused by the presence of classified information in some of the messages that Clinton gave the government. Based on what we have learned so far, it appears that Clinton’s error in asserting that there was no classified information on her server was quite likely an honest mistake. If it is not, Clinton would have been just as much at fault had she used an unsecured State Department server rather than her own.
Portrait: Richard Lempert
Richard Lempert
Richard O. Lempert was a nonresident senior fellow with Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. During 2012-2013, he was a visiting fellow in Governence Studies at the Brookings Institution. From June 2008 until July 2011, he served as chief scientist in the Human Factors/Behavioral Sciences Division of the Science and Technology Directorate in the Department of Homeland Security; and from June 2002 through May 2006, he took leave from the University of Michigan to serve as the division director for the Social and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation. His research interests are broad, encompassing, among other things, matters related to national security, government bureaucracy, juries, race relations and social science methods.
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