Hillary Clinton's E-Mails

I happened to be on the treadmill this morning when FBI Director James Comey gave his report on Clinton's use of personal e-mail servers.

They reviewed and recreated something like 31,000 emails. Of those something like 110 were flagged as potentially classified and 52 of those were determined to contain information which was classified at the time; 8 as Top Secret, 36 as Secret and 8 at Confidential.

Confidential is usually personnel information such as reviews or salary information but Secret and especially Top Secret are designations usually reserved for technical or policy information which could cause harm to US interests or US personnel if it became known to hostile agents.

I say usually because assigning classifications to stuff is far from an exact science. Often it comes down to what someone thinks is important and sometimes even oblique allusions to classified information can be construed as classified in and of itself.

None of that excuses being careless with this stuff and the FBI directer criticized both Clinton specifically and the State Department in general for being extremely careless in their handling of sensitive information.

That's a polite way of saying "how fucking stupid can you be?"

However, the FBI recommended that no charges be filed.

I think the issue probably wasn't carelessness as much as arrogance. Anyone who has had to navigate through government e-mail servers in general, and classified government e-mail servers in particular, knows they tend to be slow and far from the state of the art.

Worse is when you're on the road, there generally isn't any physical access to classified networks and you have to resort to awkward solutions such as individually encrypting the e-mails, usually with other slow, out of date software.

Well, the time of people high up in the State Department must be too fucking important to follow the rules and go through a little extra effort. That's arrogance and not carelessness.

What a dummy. If this had come out a year or two ago Sanders would be the nominee but now, unless someone can figure out how to pull a rabbit out of a hat, it's going to be Clinton or Trump.

Trump is such a poor choice that even if Clinton had published state secrets in the Washington Post I'd still vote for her over Trump.

And that's a sad commentary on the state of things.