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Comment by donnachangstein | Hacker News Reader

> There was no classified information on Clinton's server.

This is absolutely false, or as the kids call it, "misinformation".

A 3 second Google search confirms:

100 emails contained information that should have been deemed classified at the time they were sent, including 65 emails deemed "Secret" and 22 deemed "Top Secret". An additional 2,093 emails were retroactively designated confidential by the State Department.

The whole issue with her emails is she purposely never labeled anything so as to have plausible deniability.

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Nah, the whole outrage with her emails was performative outrage and hypocrisy. And no, they were not nearly comparable to what happened here nor to what DOGE does. Nor to what Trump did in the past.

"But here emails" was just republicans doing what they always do and pretending to be angry over mild stuff while giving own people pass over big stuff.

Not claiming that it is comparable, nor am I upset by it, but, one oughtn’t claim that there was nothing confidential there if there was, in fact, confidential stuff in there. I don’t care if this makes it easier for other people to make a narrative. If someone makes a false claim in these kinds of discussions, the false claim should be corrected.

I suppose a different claim strikes me as false. "should have been deemed classified at the time they were sent" is one thing, "there was, in fact, confidential stuff in there" is a different thing.

I think a decent case can be made that one rounds up to the other, but I guess that case seems more like an argument to be made than a fact to be corrected.

Just because something isn't labeled classified doesn't make it not classified. If you work anywhere with classified information, you are expected to know certain information is classified, or may become classified later. You may not always know the latter, but you should know the former.

I'm not going to defend classifying embarrassing information because it's well -- embarrassing. But the established trend is to classify information "just to be safe" and let someone else make the declassifying decisions, particularly someone that's not you.

There was a weird issue with Wikileaks in that publicly released information was still considered classified, and any documents must be still treated as such.

Was that silly, yes. This led to a weird issue where journalists and members of the public had more access to certain classified documents than people holding clearances.

The factual claim made in the comment was "The whole issue with her emails is she purposely never labeled anything so as to have plausible deniability." This is not true. This is made up post rationalization and again. It even can not be proven or disproven by whether there was some possibly maybe secret information.

That thing where one side is given unbelievable benefit of the doubt that literally ignores what was happening or is happening is not healthy.

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