It's interesting how that was Al Gore's mantra during his days as Vice President to Mr. Vice. He uttered those words 'no controlling legal authority' seven times in response to claims that he violated the law. Does anyone doubt that Obama and whoever his vice president is break that law every single day now with complete impunity?
Hillary is interesting in that she has not so far as I know, used Al Gore's words but she must be getting close as the usual Clinton fire walls go up in flames. You see this time she doesn't have anybody to blame. There is no cutout man who can take the fall for such an obvious and flagrant abuse of national security information. She took point on this one and deserves to get Gored.
The thing I wonder about now is, just how many other throne dwellers are making the same cavalier assumption that the rules don't apply to them? Do you suppose any of the various Inspectors General have made queries about the status of their management of classified information over unclassified networks? Have they investigated the readiness of their organizations to respond to Freedom of Information requests? I doubt it.
I've been on the wrong end of FOIA requests. I remember one that came in while I was at NAVCENT asking us for information on every ship, squadron, mobile unit, detachment and person who was in a given place five years earlier during DESERT STORM. We all kind of laughed and wondered who among us would have records dating back to the time of the person holding the job 4 times removed from the time in question. There wasn't a scrap of information about that time in the files I inherited. I recalled that we'd rolled 6 to 9 mobile units through the area in question during the war but I couldn't tell you which ones.
Electronic record keeping was also something of a joke. That command didn't even have an unclassified network. We had a fully operational and stable classified network but there were severe network storage limits that constrained the number of mbytes of storage one could retain. There was no disc burning or external drives. Everything was pretty much overwritten by new stuff every couple of weeks. I suspect that this is how it works even to this day.
Working at a systems acquisition command we had an unclassified network but had to beg time on classified networks. Unclassified electronic record retention was useless. The information was all coded to the person and was thus unretrievable in any case after they transferred. The classified material could not even be printed much less stored to any electronic storage media.
We know Clinton didn't review her 60,000 emails but somebody did. What kind of security clearance did that crew have? They obviously weren't familiar with what constitutes national security information but I'll bet anything you like that they knew how to snuff out smoking political guns and deep six information damaging to the Hillary's political ambitions. It's really too bad she couldn't be bothered to have a couple of real national security/America First types working in that organization of hers. Of course, her employees all worked for the State Department.
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