How secret is it? (13)

A reader who has worked with classified data for 35 years writes to state directly what I tried to say with my facetious questions in the adjacent post:

It was Hillary’s absolute responsibility to ensure her correspondence was properly marked prior to transmission. We are exhaustively trained on this. However, marking a document Secret and then launching it on an unclassified system would have been a little awkward, wouldn’t it?

Important follow-on point: If our Secretary of State was so damned ignorant she couldn’t differentiate between classified and unclassified correspondence then she was eminently, majestically unqualified to hold the office. And the President (who surely received many an e mail from the non-government e mail used by the Secretary) should be called to account for appointing someone so patently unfit to the office.

Anyone who mishandles classified material should have his or her clearance revoked. Anyone who does it willfully and systematically should suffer the legal consequences prescribed by law and government.

In a follow-up message, our reader writes: “I knew you were being facetious, but it’s frustrating to me. If I left a classified document on my desk overnight I’d expect to be fired. I’m just dumbfounded by all this…”

I thank our reader for helping me say more clearly what needs to be said.

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