This is a red herring. It doesn't matter if it was marked or not. It is up to the sender to take the precaution. That there are now thousands of emails marked after the fact as classified, wouldn't that tell you the assumption should have been made to err on the side of caution, and assume most everything you are discussing has high probability to be classified information?

And using your own insecure personal server for these emails essentially guarantees that it's been hacked by.. China, Russia, take your pick.

In fact there is a term called "born-classified" which applies to information about foreign governments provided by foreign sources. Here's some evidence:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-clinton-email...

If what the campaign says is true, then it sounds to me like a technicality. It seems to me implausible that 22 emails containing intel of the most secret sort had that intel classified after the fact (http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/20/hillary-clint...).

----------------

FROM: Important Official TO: Hillary Clinton

MESSAGE: Info you requested - JFK is still alive. He wants to meet you soon. Also, aliens. Lots of them.

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In that ridiculous example, it seems like the Sec of State isn't thinking to herself, "I hope they don't classify this info later."

It's the official's responsibility to know what is and what isn't classified whether it is "marked". As a lawyer (and a Clinton!), she would certainly be parsing her words carefully.

I did not imply anything, I said it quite clearly: some of the emails contained information that was classified at the time she sent/received them.

According to CNN:

> Two government agencies flagged emails on Clinton's server as containing classified information, the inspector general said, including some on "special access programs," which are a subset of the highest "Top Secret" level of classification, but are under subject to more stringent control rules than even other Top Secret information."

Ref: http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/19/politics/hillary-clinton-email...

Less than functional or not, it is the duty of people with access to classified information to protect it. You sign tons of paperwork to that effect.

Honest mistakes happen all the time. If you're lucky, your hand is slapped and people move along. But it is possible to have your clearance revoked - like Sandy Berger - or even serve prison time for purposeful malfeasance or disregard for the rules.

And this isn't a new thing... remember how when Obama took office everyone talked about securing his Blackberry - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/us/politics/23berry.html?_... ?

> While lawyers and the Secret Service balked at Mr. Obama’s initial requests to allow him to keep his BlackBerry, they acquiesced as long as the president — and those corresponding with him — agreed to strict rules. And he had to agree to use a specially made device, which must be approved by national security officials.

State laws vary, but jeb bush has been pretty transparent - iirc he actually released a book of his emails as governor.

To the best of my knowledge, governors would rarely have access to classified information other than law enforcement or potentially terrorism matters, so the laws and rules would be different than a Cabinet Secretary.

I can't speak about Florida or any State specifically, my background is purely at the Federal level.

> the use of the private email doesn't seem to be relevant to the document release itself, right? That's just the result of a FOI request, because public official's emails are subject to FOI, regardless of where they're stored.

I think probably someone would have tried to obtain her emails, whether the server issue came up or not. But as it happened, IIRC the sequence of events leading to the release began when the server issue came up.

Also relevant is that because Clinton controlled the server, she originally controlled which emails were deleted as 'personal' and which were released to the public.

> do the States not tend to have the same kind of FOI transparency as the Federal Government?

Some states, at least, have open records laws. Also, I've seen many governmental organizations adopt the policy of deleting all email after, e.g., 30 days, to reduce 'liability' (transparency).

> Is there a similar archive of Jeb Bush's emails from his time as Governor of Florida?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jeb+bush+emails+site%3Anytimes.com

> How do public officials keep their legitimately personal business private? (E.g., having an affair)

If there's any grains of truth in House of Cards, I assume burner phones

The latter. You can still use personal accounts for personal matters.

http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/toolkit/pdf/ID317.pdf

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/04/02/396823...

Pretty sure only when they are acting. I believe they can have personal email accounts/phones, but they cannot use them for official business. Of course, we all know how nearly impossible that is to pull of. For which, you'll have courts and analysts just like this, sitting there sifting the wheat from the chaff if it makes it this far.

All government work related emails are archived. They're available to the public through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests - basically, you make a request to the federal government for certain types of information and they are required to provide it to you, subject to limitations for relevance, confidentiality, etc.

Purely personal emails aren't archived. Government officials and employees use personal email accounts all the time, and their contents aren't turned over to the government PROVIDED that they relate purely to prsonal matters.

But in Hillary Clinton's case, she used a personal email account (stored on her personal server) exclusively to conduct government business. She said she turned over government-related emails to the State Department (as is required by law) and permanently deleted the rest. She also says she never sent confidential info or received information marked as confidential through this personal email address.

There are several investigations going on right now into her email practices. The focus primarily is on whether she mishandled confidential/top secret information. In response to FOIA and other legal requests, the State Department has been releasing her emails to the public. But the State Department has been withholding some documents on the basis that they contained confidential/top secret information after all.

Clinton says the agencies are retroactively applying an overly broad definition of confidnetiality to her emails, but her detractors are saying that the confidentiality designations show that she mishandled government secrets in violation of the law. Hence the political firestorm.

No matter how this turns out, using a homebrew personal email server to conduct state business was an incredibly foolish thing to do. I can't believe Clinton did this. I don't care if Palin or Jeb Bush or other people used personal servers too - she was the Secretary of State with presidential ambitions, and she's had a big red target on her since 1992. This reinforces the worst stereotypes that people have about her and the Clintons in general, that they are secretive, paranoid, conspiratorial, and completely willing to operate in the grey areas of the law.

Powell and Rice did not operate their own private email servers.

... when it was perfectly legal. It wasn't made illegal until 2009, by Obama's own hand.

I think it's safe to say that if Petraeus had done what Hillary apparently did, he would be incarcerated.

If conversations in social settings with former colleagues in the IC / DoD are indicative of sentiment throughout these communities, there will be a tremendous amount of discontent if she is not prosecuted for her decision to conduct official communications as one of the most senior members of the USG over an unsecured personal email server starting in 2009.

You see similar things in the military as a tension between enlisted service members and officers. It's a common belief that officers can get away with murder while the enlisted are given severe punishments for minor infractions. There's plenty of truth to it, but also a less visible component; it's far easier to get rid of officers than enlisted because enlistment confers rights, whereas officers serve at the pleasure of the President. So while officers aren't being made to stand in front of everyone while being berated for showing up late, I've known officers to be kicked out for things as minor as poorly-timed kidney stones (right before they were supposed to start a school.)

Anyway, all that is to say that the underlings are subjected to the rules, but up at the top it's more a matter of shuffling people away, often with minimal fanfare.

While there is no evidence that her email server was hacked, she did have correspondence with Sydney Blumenthal, who's account WAS hacked, and emails from that account were published.[1] This, combined with the fact that Clinton's server didn't boast the best security (allegedly), and it's not a stretch to imagine that her server was hacked.

[1] https://pando.com/2015/03/20/exclusive-interview-jailed-hack...