The State Department admits that current Secretary of State John Kerry used a “non-official account” to send classified material to his predecessor Hillary Clinton, who was using an unsecure, off-the-books private server to handle her email.
The latest twist in the Clinton email scandal is an email then-Senator Kerry sent in 2011, when he was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, as described by The Hill:
The message referenced India, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was classified for containing information about foreign governments and U.S. foreign relations.
“We all know this will be a troubled relationship because that is it’s [sic] nature,” he wrote in one unredacted section. “But there are real possibilities at this moment to put options to the test.”
Kerry’s email was classified at the “secret” level, which is a higher level than “confidential” but lower than “top secret”
A note at the bottom of the message indicates that it was sent from Kerry’s iPad.
The Associated Press describes two more questionable Kerry emails:
Another email that Kerry sent to Clinton on his iPad, from Aug. 28, 2012, was released in full on Friday with no redactions. Another email from Feb. 4, 2012, apparently not sent from Kerry’s iPad, was classified in full at the “confidential” or lowest level.
[State Department spokesman John] Kirby could not immediately say if either of those two messages was sent from Kerry’s non-official account.
That seems like an odd detail for the State Department spokesman to be unclear about. The originating account for an email is not difficult to view.
“There was no indication that the information in Kerry’s email was considered classified at any level at the time it was sent or if Kerry, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would have considered it particularly sensitive,” the AP adds. “Several hours after Kerry sent the email, Clinton forwarded it to a staffer with the instructions ‘pls print.'”
According to Kirby, the non-official account Kerry employed to send these messages from his iPad is no longer active.
The Washington Examiner notes these Kerry-Clinton emails were “included among a small batch of records made public by the State Department Friday.”
Before we even get into the “born classified” argument about foreign information, which would suggest some of these “retroactive” classifications aren’t as retroactive as Administration apologists would like us to believe, we should note these emails are further evidence of Administration officials deliberately concealing the existence of Clinton’s irregular email account.
We’ve already seen documentation proving that President Obama lied when he claimed to be unaware of Clinton’s homebrew email server – he sent numerous messages to the ClintonEmail.com address.
Now we have documented proof that John Kerry knew about her email in 2011, when he was in the Senate… but the State Department under Secretary of State Kerry didn’t admit the existence of Clinton’s server, or any of her hidden emails, until forced to do so by the House Benghazi Committee.
Somehow that very important detail gets overlooked in much of the media coverage of Clinton’s email scandal. Her talking points about “voluntary disclosure” and “transparency” could not be more false. All of her email was deliberately hidden from Congress, the courts, and the American people. It required an active conspiracy by numerous State Department officials to hide her correspondence – they continually responded to legal requests for Clinton emails by claiming none existed, when they knew perfectly well that a vast trove of those emails was sitting on her private server.
We didn’t see a single one of her emails until long after Kerry took over as Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton never voluntarily disclosed a single one of those emails – she was forced to disclose them by the State Department, which was in turn forced to ask for them. It is now crystal clear that Clinton’s successor as Secretary of State knew about her email server, but kept quiet, even as the Benghazi controversy raged. “Transparency” for this Administration is a childish game of hide-and-seek, while national security is an afterthought.
In addition to the famed Clinton email scandal, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter caused some embarrassment for the Administration in December when it was discovered he was using a personal email account for official business during the first few months of his tenure. Carter admitted this was a “mistake” and stopped using the account after White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough found out about it, and told the White House Counsel’s Office to contact the Defense Department.
On Tuesday, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent Carter a letter asking for more details about his use of private email, citing the Clinton case as a reason for increased concern about the threat of foreign hackers. Grassley said it was “troubling” that Carter continued using private email “even after the risks of private use were made clear when news of Secretary Clinton’s use broke.”
Foreign intelligence agents will mourn the day the Obama Administration ends. They’ve never had it so easy before, and hopefully they never will again.
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