Two Things

In all the Sturm und Drang around Hillary Clinton's email, can we please keep in mind two things:

1) Once it became known that Clinton's emails were to be made public, a virtual classification blizzard occurred as not only State, but other departments, retroactively started classifying emails. This is somewhat understandable as no one wants things originally said in private to be made public (whether a government, a company, or a private citizen). This is also a main complaint that people and organizations have when they make a FOIA request: Suddenly, everything gets marked as Classified.

2) None of the real Classified stuff was ever supposed to be sent over unclassified State Department e-mail addresses in the first place by anyone! There is a whole other system in place for top secret information or, really, any information “classified at birth.” The State Dept. -- like the Pentagon, the White House, and other agencies -- has two systems for email, one for classified messages and one for more routine business. The emails to and from Clinton we're all discussing are ones from the regular, unclassified system (and her system). No one is sending nuclear codes over this system in the first place. And, yeah, out of tens of thousands of emails, 3 "(C)"s buried in the body of emails/documents could be easily missed as *anything* marked that way isn't supposed to be in this system to begin with. It's also why she stated confidently that nothing she received or that she sent was marked Classified. It would have stuck out like a red thumb if it had been because it would have been on the wrong damn system.