OK, Then How DID She Send Classified Data?

Way, way back in 2014, I wrote a piece that included a judge's instruction I got while on a small-town jury in a murder trial thirty years ago.  The instruction, to "look at circumstantial evidence not only in the sense of its consistency with guilt but inconsistency with innocence", has changed the way I look at situations.

It is with that viewpoint that I step far, far above the controversy over Hillary Clinton's contemptible use of a private email server while a Cabinet officer, to avoid access to her communications by FOIA requests.  By "far back", I mean not getting stuck down a rat-hole about this or that email, and looking at the situation.

And when we do that, some questions really rise quickly to the top, and one in particular.

We know that Hillary arranged for the private server to be set up for her emails on the very day her confirmation hearings before Congress began.  She never even established the more-secure "hillary.r.clinton@state.gov" account required of State Department employees, and of all the other civilian Federal agency employees and contractors using official email.

We know that she did that to avoid exposure to FOIA inquiries; we know because she was caught on email explaining that was why she didn't have an @state.gov account, so people couldn't see her personal communications.

We know that, as a result of not having a proper email account, she sent or received over 2,000 emails with classified information on them on a private server, in defiance of Federal law, including at least some with paragraphs marked to indicate the content was classified.

We know that the FBI made an impossibly broad interpretation of the law against doing all the above, which allowed her to skate and avoid indictment despite the mountain of evidence demanding, at the least, a grand jury investigation.

We don't, however, know one particularly valuable piece of information in this whole sorry affair.

The Secretary of State of the United States communicates sensitive information literally dozens of times on a daily basis.  The Secretary sends and receives information about embassies, about the activities of foreign governments, about agreements between nations.

There is intelligence information beyond imagining, regarding our gathering of data around the globe, classified imagery, information about the activities of our agents worldwide, about treaties, about negotiations of a particularly sensitive nature.

This is the lifeblood of the State Department, and when the Secretary is involved, it constantly is classified, and frequently at the highest levels.

Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, did not have a government email account.  She had only a private, unsecured email server that we know of.

So how, then, did she communicate all that sensitive information, dozens of times a day, and still maintain the needed level of security on that communication?
 
No government account.  She claims that she didn't do classified business on her private server (although we already know that to be a lie, thanks to the FBI).  If she didn't do it on her private email server in a bathroom in Chappaqua, then how in heck did she actually communicate with all the different people she needed to send and receive messages from?

This, friends, is a question that the press should be asking, not just of her (since she doesn't take questions from the press) but of the FBI which spent thousands of hours investigating her.  Ask Cheryl Mills.  Ask Huma Abedin.  Heck, ask Chelsea!

And the next time she uses her tenure as Secretary of State to defend her capacity to be president, we ought to ask how she managed to do it when no one could send her a darned message, and she couldn't even contact her own embassies.

Frightening, eh?

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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