Hillary Lies at C-in-C Forum

Vincent J. Curtis

10 Sept 2016

John Lester is the retired Air Force and Naval pilot who held a Top Secret – Special Campartmented Information security clearance and who, at the Commander-in-Chief Forum hosted by NBC’s Matt Lauer, challenged Hillary Clinton.  He prefaced his question by saying that he would have been jailed for doing what Hillary did with classified information, and he then asked her how she could be trusted with classified material as president.

Hillary replied more or less as follows:

“Classified material is designated.  It is marked.  There is a header so that there is no dispute at all that what is being communicated to or from someone is marked classified.  What we have here is the use of an unclassified system that was used by hundreds of people in our government to send information that was not marked.  There were no headers.  There was no statement top secret, secret, or confidential.  I communicated about classified material on a wholly separate system.  I took it very seriously.”

There are as many lies in this short passage as there were in Hillary’s infamous press conference at the United Nations on March 10, 2015, which concluded with “There is no classified material.”  Mr. Lester listened to Hillary’s reply with far more patience than I could.  I would have interrupted Hillary about three sentences in, saying “That’s a lie, Hillary.  That simply isn’t true.”

Let’s start with the statement “I communicated about classified material on a wholly separate system.”  This is simply a lie.  When FOIA requests for Hillary’s emails were made by Judicial Watch, the State Department replied that there was no material responsive to the request.  In plain English, State could find no emails that Hillary wrote in their systems, classified or otherwise, over her entire tenure as Secretary of State.  JW’s lawsuit was dismissed, and wasn’t reinstated until The New York Times reported on Hillary’s secret server.  Hillary never used a wholly separate system operated by the U.S. government, as she told Mr. Lester she had.

Now, let’s turn to Hillary’s description of what classified material is supposed to look like.  This is a complete dodge.  There is a difference between classified material and classified information.  A classified document in a piece of paper with markings on it.  These markings are usually in the form of letters that arranged into words.  These in turn are arranged into sentences and paragraphs.  A literate person is able to interpret the markings on the paper into words and sentences that convey information to the intellect.  Information per se is not material, for it exists in the human mind.  Information, strictly speaking, cannot be “marked” because only physical things can be marked.  Information can be classified as secret or top secret, but it cannot be marked because it is not physical.  Only classified material, such as documents, can be “marked” because they are physical things. 

When we say that a document contains classified information we are speaking somewhat loosely, for it requires a mind literate in the written word to make informational sense of the markings on the page.

A finished, properly marked document may contain classification markings.  This is what Hillary described.  But a document can still contain classified information without being marked as Hillary described.  For example, before the document passes through a classification authority, it can exist without classification markings.  And a document created by copy-typing the contents of a classified document onto a blank page, or into an email, possesses classified information without markings.  Hence, classified material that exists as a physical thing isn’t always as Hillary described.  You can, as the FBI did, put classification markings onto a document that contains no classified information.  So there is no necessary connection between markings and classified information in a document.

The purpose of putting classification markings on a document is so that a person can see at a glance the classification level of the information in the document without having to read it.

And the Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement that Hillary signed on January 22, 2009, makes reference to unmarked documents containing classified information.  “As used in this Agreement, classified information is marked or unmarked classified information, including oral communications.”  (Oral communications, of course, cannot contain physical markings)  Hillary also agreed to protect “unclassified information that meets the standards for classification and is in the process of classification determination.”

So all the talk about headers and so forth are quite irrelevant to classified information, which is what Hillary swore to protect.  Hillary simply lied.

Hillary was truthful when she said that her secret system was unclassified and was used to send information that was not marked.  First, information cannot be “marked” in a physical sense.  Hillary’s emails were indeed not marked, but the FBI found that roughly 15% of the emails they recovered from her server that pertained to State Department business contained classified information and were not properly marked.  Some indeed, was properly marked, as Director Comey explained, “at the time.”  That part made her remarks to Mr. Lester a lie.  The fact that many emails were not properly marked does not mean that they did not contain classified information.  As an Original Classification Authority, Hillary was responsible for recognizing and properly classifying unmarked classified material, such as paper documents and emails.  It was her duty which she swore to uphold, and she demonstrated to the FBI the capacity to recognize classified information.

One could get into the business that electronic documents, as emails are, not being physical objects were not marked, since only physical things can be marked.  But Hillary did not make use of this distinction in her reply to Mr. Lester.

Hillary continues to lie about her emails, and her response to Mr. Lester was another brazen attempt to bamboozle an unsophisticated audience.  One hopes that by now the public is alive to her attempts to deceive.

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