You rubes. Don't you understand that the entire problem Hillary Clinton is facing over her use of a private server to process government communications is the fault of thousands upon thousands of people who don't know how to classify documents?
That's essentially the argument Hillary Clinton's spinmeisters are now employing. This evening, Josh Gerstein at the Politico was all too ready to relay such arguments, even to the point of cleaning up what one of her defenders said to advance the cause.
This afternoon, the web site's Annie Karni posted the following tweet:
Note that quote marks surround all but the first seven words.
But in an item updated this evening at 8:40 p.m. Josh Gerstein wrote the following about what Fallon said:
Look at how Gerstein changed what Karni quoted, replacing "unwitting" with "classified," arguably to make Fallon look less incoherent — the better to ensure that very few people ask, as Allahpundit at Hot Air did in reaction to Karni's tweet, "What exactly is 'unwitting information'?" (The dictionary definition of "unwitting" clearly refers to the actions or mental states of people, not passive objects.)
But speaking of incoherent, look at the pathetic example Clinton's defenders have cited as justifying their contention that nobody in the military and intelligence communities knows what they're doing when it comes to document security classifications (links are in original; bolds are mine):
In the past 24 hours, Clinton’s aides and allies have increasingly trained their fire on seemingly-baffling aspects of government’s national security classification system. And on Wednesday, the Clinton camp got a new piece of ammunition for its argument: a heavily redacted transcript the State Department just released of a conversation former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had with CIA Director William Colby in 1974 about the imminent Turkish invasion of Cyprus.
In the transcript made public by the National Security Archive, the State Department deleted all substantive portions of the conversation, asserting that they were classified national security secrets and contained sensitive details about the CIA’s personnel and structure.
However, researchers at the nonprofit document archive thought the transcript looked familiar and soon realized why: Eight years ago, the State Department issued an official history volume that published it in full, as unclassified. In fact, the unredacted copy was sitting on the agency’s website even as officials sent out to the group the largely expurgated version.
”The fact that someone in the intelligence community apparently sought to redact a 40-plus-year-old document, despite it being in the public sphere already in completely unredacted form, drives at exactly the point we are making about how entire agencies within the government can have competing views on what is sensitive and what is not,” Clinton presidential campaign spokesman Brian Fallon told POLITICO. “This is a window into the phenomenon of overclassification that is currently bottling up the review of former Secretary Clinton’s emails.”
Seriously, Team Hillary is citing a mistake made eight years ago in the handling of a 40 year-old document (note how it therefore must be Nixon's and Bush 43's fault) to "prove" their "point," which is that the system for classifying documents and communications isn't absolutely crystal clear. Politico's Gerstein apparently believes that this hopelessly lame example constitutes legitimate "ammunition" for the Clintonistas' argument. They're in woeful shape if that really is their best argument.
By this "logic," there's no way anyone can predict how any emails, even those involving the possession of satellite images and "Libyan troop strength and movements," both of which Mrs. Clinton is alleged to have possessed on her server, would have been classified by all those incompetent people working in the military, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies.
Further, CBS News's Jan Crawford reported tonight that scope of questions raised about Mrs. Clinton's protection of classified information may be far greater than originally thought:
... it is not just Clinton's private server that may have contained classified information. The State Department filed court papers Wednesday afternoon saying it "does not believe that any personal computing device was issued by the Department" to Clinton.
"Anytime you're bringing your own equipment and using it for work purposes, it's not as secure as something that's actually issued by the company," CNET senior editor Dan Ackerman explained. "Because they take those laptops, for example, and they pre-configure them, they put their own software on them, tracking software, update software, and they distribute them."
That raises the question, how secure were her personal devices, like her BlackBerry, since they weren't issued by the State Department?
Team Hillary wants the answer to be, "Who cares?" Apparently, Politico's Gerstein would be okay with that.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
