During this entire campaign year, we have been hearing over and over about Hillary Clinton’s emails. She was accused of sending out classified emails from her private server.
She also endured an 11-hour grillfest about Benghazi, and they couldn’t find evidence of any crime.
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates came to Clinton’s defense about the overclassification of emails. There is often confusion involved with deciding what information should be classified. Some things are overclassified, and some are classified after the fact. Many of the emails found on Clinton’s server were found to be retroactively classified.
Gates had this to say about it:
“The truth is, things are overclassified, and sometimes I would get something and it would be classified Secret or Top Secret. And I would look at somebody and say, I’m about to tell a foreign leader what is on this piece of paper that’s marked Top Secret… Why are you giving it to me as a talking point if it’s classified Top Secret? So it is tough sometimes. And if you don’t have any markings on a piece of paper, it is tough sometimes to tell whether it’s classified or not.”
Republicans are still going after Clinton for this, even after Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice admitted to having similar problems with their emails. Powell even said that some very mundane information would end up classified, even though it was not necessary.
Representative Elijah Cummings of the House Oversight Committee said:
“My concern has been that Republicans are spending millions of taxpayer dollars singling out Secretary Clinton because she is running for President — often leaking inaccurate information — while at the same time disregarding the actions of Republican Secretaries of State.”
Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta said:
“This announcement about Secretary Powell’s emails shows just how routine it is for government bureaucrats to go overboard when it comes to judging whether information is too sensitive for the public to see.”
She is not the only one to deal with the issue. Here is Robert Gates’ interview about the subject:
Featured image via YouTube.
