State Dept. Releases 5,500 Hillary Clinton Emails, 275 Retroactively Classified (nbcnews.com)

An anonymous reader sends this report from NBC News: The State Department on Thursday released 5,500 more pages of Hillary Clinton's emails, but fell short of meeting a court-ordered target of making 82 percent of the former secretary of state's messages public by the end of 2015. The email dump is the latest release from the private server Clinton used during her time as America's top diplomat. The State Department said it failed to meet the court's goal because of "the large number of documents involved and the holiday schedule." Portions of 275 documents in the batch were upgraded to classified, though they were not classified at the time they were sent to Clinton's personal email, according to the State Department. In total, 1,274 of her emails were retroactively classified by the government before their release.

Comments

Re:State doing the CYA thing

[silas_moeckel]

You do not understand how classified etc works. It's not about the markings it's about the content. If you can legitimately mark it as classified later it always was classified and she was instructed how to understand this. The corner case is something that seems entirely unrelated to anything and then turns out to be part of a state secret, as in you need other knowledge to know that this is classified. All the markings do it make it entirely unambiguous.

It realy does not matter if they were or were not classified, 2009 Federal Records Act requires all emails that are part of official business be preserved by the federal government. The Classified not classified bit is political spin to keep the discussion on that not the much broader law she violated.

Re:State doing the CYA thing

[Lt.Hawkins]

I posted this link elsewhere but:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the...

The whole thing is interesting and relevent, but in particular:

"(d) All original classification authorities must receive training in proper classification (including the avoidance of over-classification) and declassification as provided in this order and its implementing directives at least once a calendar year. Such training must include instruction on the proper safeguarding of classified information and on the sanctions in section 5.5 of this order that may be brought against an individual who fails to classify information properly or protect classified information from unauthorized disclosure. Original classification authorities who do not receive such mandatory training at least once within a calendar year shall have their classification authority suspended by the agency head or the senior agency official designated under section 5.4(d) of this order until such training has taken place. A waiver may be granted by the agency head, the deputy agency head, or the senior agency official if an individual is unable to receive such training due to unavoidable circumstances. Whenever a waiver is granted, the individual shall receive such training as soon as practicable."

Rarely or not, she should have had annual training, and to dodge this is to say that a person who reaches that level of government has no responsibility to uphold the more "mundane" things of their job.

A person who dodges this responsibility is not fit to lead others who are held to the same responsibility (the entire Executive branch)

Re: State doing the CYA thing

[jmac_the_man]

Tell us how Hillary! can see intelligence data from CIA or NGA, not recognize it as TOP SECRET (and more because it's probably SCI also) and still be qualified to be President.

There's no "probably" involved. Hillary sent at least two emails which were redacted as Talent Keyhole. Talent Keyhole is an SCI program involving a specific imaging satellite or set of imaging satellites. All Talent Keyhole images are SCI because we don't want the enemy to know the capabilities of the satellite. (On the other hand, the fact that "NGA has a super cool spy satellite named Talent Keyhole" isn't classified and shows up in the press. Just the images are classified.)
TLDR: The State Department has admitted that Hillary's server was used to send spy satellite images that are more classified than TOP SECRET.

Re: State doing the CYA thing

[funwithBSD]

It is even more mundane than that.

ANY report on communication with a foreign agent, i.e. minister, diplomat, government worker, is considered classified. Not like Keyhole, but still classified.

So if anything like "The Canadian Ambassador expressed his concern about the Keystone pipeline..." is born classified.