There seems to be no end to the revelations about classified information being compromised through Hillary Clinton’s email network when she was at the State Department.
The whole story of it seems to be so massive as to defy reconstruction, involving thousands of emails and a number of wholly unsecured personal accounts. Now it appears that Hillary aide Huma Abedin forwarded at least 45 emails containing extensively redacted passages to two personal accounts. These email accounts were exempted from domain-name identification due to “personal privacy exemption.”
In other words, there is no question these accounts are considered to pertain only personally, and not in any government-professional capacity, to Ms. Abedin.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
We’ve known for some time that Abedin was among the Hillary aides who had used their personal accounts to do official government business. Among other things, she handled confidential information about Hillary’s travel schedule via her personal account, and processed through it emails from Britain’s Tony Blair, and other items marked with warnings such as “Foreign government information” and “foreign relations or foreign activities of the US, including confidential sources.”
But what WND’s Jerome Corsi has found in the latest tranche of emails released under court order to Judicial Watch is that Abedin forwarded a number of emails containing information apparently so classified that it was comprehensively redacted by the State Department before even Congress was allowed to see it.
Corsi summarizes:
Of the more than 160 emails in the latest Judicial Watch release, some 110 emails – two-thirds of the total – were forwarded by Abedin to personal addresses she controlled, humamabedin@[redacted] and habedin@[redacted].
Even more potentially damaging, of the 110 emails Abedin forwarded to her personal email servers, 45 were found by WND to have contained heavily redacted information, with some 20 of the emails 100 percent redacted. Many have a bold “PAGE DENIED” stamped on the page.
In other words, almost half of the emails that Abedin forwarded to her unsecured personal account have information the State Department deems too sensitive to be seen by members of Congress or the American people.
It seems unlikely that the State Department considered it necessary to redact pages and pages of Hillary’s yoga-related plans.
A quick review of some of the fully redacted emails shows, on the other hand, that the subjects include the “QDDR” – State Department Quarterly Diplomacy and Development Review – and Hillary’s budget testimony to Congress.
This is actually interesting, because it suggests a dismissive attitude toward the FOIA release and the email controversy in general. The baseline QDDR summary, and perhaps Hillary’s budget testimony, would be likely to contain some classified information, but not large amounts of it. Certainly, the whole text would not be classified.
Indeed, Hillary would routinely hand it over to Congress for publication, and discuss most of it in public hearings. So why are the contents of these emails completely redacted?
Frankly, it looks like complete redaction was just the easiest thing to do, and the State Department knew it would get away with such a sloppy approach.
Keep in mind: redacting more carefully would reveal exactly where the classified passages were. And the State Department knows it’s not going to be called on the carpet for failing to redact more carefully. The Justice Department and FBI have already given Hillary her get-out-of-jail-free card on this. No one is going to be pursued for mishandling the information.
That card will probably cover Huma Abedin too. So, as far as we know, she forwarded emails absolutely stuffed with highly classified information to her personal accounts. But unlike the many “little” people Obama has prosecuted for leaking or mishandling classified information, she not only won’t be called to account for it – we’ll never even know exactly what happened.
Not what the Founders had in mind, with the concept of equality before the law.
