Hillary’s header defense

At the so-called Commander-in-Chief Forum last night on MSNBC Madam Hillary yammered on about her treatment of classified information in response to questions posed by Matt Lauer. See Jack Heretik’s summary in the Free Beacon report (with video) “Lauer blitzes Clinton over email server.”

For Lauer Clinton served up many of the lies and evasions that have become her stock in trade, including hiding behind respected colleagues of long tenure. “Well, Matt, I just respectfully point to the hundreds of experienced foreign policy experts, diplomats, defense officials, who were communicating information on the unclassified system, because it was necessary to answer questions,” she said. What a woman.

She rolled out a variation of her old lies in response to a pointed question from Lt. John Lester (video below). Lester observed: “Had I communicated [highly classified] information [to which he had access] not following prescribed protocols, I would have been prosecuted and imprisoned. Secretary Clinton, how can you expect those such as myself, who were and are entrusted with America’s most sensitive information, to have any confidence in your leadership as president when you clearly corrupted our national security?”

Here Clinton rolled out the well-known Header Defense for public consumption. She told Lester that there was no header on the email designating it as sensitive information. Hey, if there’s no header, it’s not classified! Exposing the information on an insecure system is okay! It says so right in the espionage laws (not).

And if there’s no header, Clinton doesn’t recognize classified information. Clinton doesn’t agree with the proposition that classification inheres in the information rather than the marking. (See, e,g., Clinton’s Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement.)

Accordingly, Clinton behaved admirably: “So I did exactly what I should have done and I take it very seriously, always have, always will.”

Hillary Clinton makes Richard Nixon look like a paragon of civic virtue. She makes Bernie Madoff look like a man with a social conscience.

Via Chandler Gill/Washington Free Beacon.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses