03/03/16 – Peter Van Buren – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show, here on LRN.
All right, McClatchy says, at least 2,079 Clinton emails contain classified material.
Washington Post says, Justice Department grants immunity to staffer who set up Clinton email server.
Although it says in here that they don't know of any grand jury actually in panel, but maybe that's changing.
Fox News says, spy agencies say Clinton emails closely matched top-secret documents.
And Peter Van Buren at Antiwar.com says, that's a problem.
Welcome back to the show, Peter.
How are you doing?
Always a pleasure, Scott.
Y'all, Peter Van Buren, he was in the State Department for many years and including in Iraq.
And he wrote the book, We Meant Well, and that's the name of his blog as well.
This one is reprinted at Antiwar.com slash blog.
Again, intel agencies, Clinton emails match top-secret documents.
So you know what?
I think my kind of previous maybe conception of this was, eh, it's just another one of them fake scams.
They never go after them about the real stuff as, you know, get away with Cambodia but get them for Watergate, something like that.
But then again, I don't know, Watergate was a crime.
So just how bad is this email scandal?
Is it actually a thing?
It is, and it is for several reasons.
The most significant reason is that Hillary Clinton wants to be and has a very good chance of being the next president of the United States.
People who throw themselves into that contest are asking to be judged.
And one of the things we, what's left of the people, need to judge is that person's judgment, their honesty, their sincerity, and how they make decisions.
Because so much of what the president does happens behind closed doors, for better or worse, and we have to entrust them with so much of our daily life.
So you've got to look beyond their talking points, look beyond their canned statements, and look to their actions.
Most of these candidates, Hillary in particular, have a very long history, and we need to kind of parse that out and decide what kind of person we may be voting for.
In this case, it's a person who clearly threw national security out the window for her personal convenience.
That's not someone I want in the White House.
All right, but you know what?
TV says that that's all overblown because what we're talking about is apparently a bunch of stuff that got retroactively declassified, and ain't that just like a bunch of Republicans to make a big deal about someone going back ex post facto and saying you shouldn't have sent that email you sent?
That's not fair.
Peter, what about that?
Well, it has to be true if you use Latin, like ex post facto, because that's like lawyer stuff.
Article 1, section 9, right?
Oh, wow.
Okay.
I'm intimidated.
But while I recover from that, let me talk a little bit about classification and retroactive classification.
The idea is that classification is not a stamp on a document, as you see on TV.
It is what the contents of that particular document represent, which is often expressed with a level of classification applied.
But in a government system, the lowest level, if you will, is unclassified.
In other words, every document within the government has a classification level.
One of them might be unclassified, and documents are labeled as such.
If I was still working at the State Department, and miraculously you were too, Scott, and I sent you an email across the office saying, hey, let's go to lunch, that document would be marked unclassified automatically by the system, because we'd been using an unclassified system.
When you go to Clinton World and you're using a private server, then it's much more like you and I emailing over our Gmail accounts.
There's no classification marked, because it's Gmail.
What's happened with Hillary's stuff is that unless one of her correspondents was stupid enough to say, hey, I'm about to break the law by marking this classified and sending it in an unclassified system, of course none of her documents are going to have a marking on them.
But that doesn't change the underlying information.
She's lying about that.
When we talk about retroactive classification in the Clinton context here, what we're actually talking about is restoring the classification in most cases.
In other words, the document began life as a secret document that originated, say, at the CIA.
Someone on Clinton's team retyped contents of it into an unclassified email and sent it.
When the government took another look at it last month, they said, holy crap, we can't release that.
It's really secret.
It always was.
So we will restore the classification.
That said- So it's not that they cut off the stamp at the top when they faxed it or some kind of thing here, right?
You're saying they just, they would, and maybe copy and paste just sections over that way, or we're talking about documents maybe generated by the State Department staff themselves where it never would get a classified stamp on in the first place.
To a certain extent, all of the above.
There's no physical connection between the classified and unclassified systems.
You simply cannot cut and paste or email from one to the other.
So it'd have to be retyped from someone looking at the other screen kind of thing, I see.
No, it's called sneaker net.
You basically print out the document on the classified system and then you type in the parts that you want to send in the unclassified system.
So just to be, just to make sure I understand you here, what they would do, you're saying this is what they're doing, but they're using this as their excuse.
Look, it doesn't say secret or top secret on it.
That's correct.
And that's the best defense that they have for what amounts to actually a confession in a sense.
Absolutely.
The idea would be is, let's say I had a list of all of the undercover CIA operatives around the world in alphabetical order and I neglected to write ultimate top secret on it and I just dropped it on the ground and you picked it up.
The underlying information is controlling.
The fact that there, for whatever reason, isn't something, a marking on there that says top secret does not change the fact that I've just disclosed a list of worldwide CIA undercover operatives.
And that's the case with Clinton.
When they retyped information because she wanted it on her unclass system, which allowed her to use her iPad and her BlackBerry and all those other things that are not available in classified form because they're just simply too vulnerable, they just retyped it for her.
And that saved her the inconvenience of having to work with a clumsy system, the classified system because security is clumsy to work with.
Let me just swing back very quickly to retroactively classified because such a thing, in fact, does exist.
The government can, in fact, retroactively classify something and the case has actually gone as far as the Supreme Court, a whistleblower for the TSA named Robert McLean, who we may have talked about some time ago, was actually thrown out of his job for passing unclassified information to a reporter, which was later classified and he was punished as if it was classified from the beginning.
So retroactive classification does exist, but it's not an excuse.
The idea would be that Hillary still would be prosecutable even if the information truly was retroactively classified.
And one more lie that the Clinton people are trying to go to lunch with, and that is this idea that it's possible to fight inside the government about classification.
Not really, because the rule is that the originating agency, the people who create the information, set the classification level.
If you're in the CIA, you can fight as much as you want inside the CIA, but when the document emerges and gets sent over to the State Department and it's marked secret or it's marked confidential, that's it.
The State Department can't simply decide on its own to change that.
And so all this, forgive me, BS about that, well, state and CIA don't agree or Washington's having its usual in the beltway arguments, again, is simply a lie.
The question for us is, no matter how bullish the Clintons are about fooling the public and fooling the mainstream media, the FBI knows how these rules work.
The question then becomes, will she or any of her people be prosecuted, indicted, punished, or called out in any way?
She can't BS them the way she does the public, but on the other hand, they've got to take action for this to matter.
Well, and of course, it's a political decision, not a legal one, whether she'll be prosecuted.
So that goes without saying.
Let me ask you one more thing here real quick.
Am I right?
Is it obvious?
Am I wrong?
And what seems obvious to me is there are better explanations than they did this because they wanted to be able to destroy stuff later.
They didn't want it to be in the hands of anybody but themselves.
And that was why they set it up.
You referenced, well, she wanted to be able to use her BlackBerry and that kind of thing.
So that makes sense too, that it was mostly about her own freedom of action in a way.
But then I believe they said, Peter, that there are 30,000 missing emails that she claims are all private and most of them with Bill, even though he says he's only used email twice in his whole life.
So did they recover those 30,000?
And am I wrong in just assuming that the reason that they set the server up at her house was for the purposes of deleting 30,000 emails later before she ran for president?
The purpose of the server was multifold and certainly predominant in Clinton's mind was the ability to shield all this stuff from FOIA requests and to maintain total control over the information.
So as you said, they can simply delete what they don't want to ever make public.
And that is what happened here.
The emails that the State Department are releasing right now are highly curated.
The Clinton team, including her lawyers, turned over only emails to the State Department that they wanted to, claiming the others were personal and nothing to do with work.
And if you believe that, well.
Well, wasn't there a story where the FBI says, yeah, right, we hacked your hard drive and we found them all?
Or no?
No, the FBI has been extremely quiet about what they know and what they don't know.
As most people know, and your tech people certainly know, there are many different ways of deleting something off your computer.
Some of them are basically not deletions at all.
You just hit the delete key.
It's still on your computer somewhere.
There are levels of wiping a server clean that can extend to physically destroying the disks that are essentially unrecoverable at some level.
So the server that's now in the FBI's possession was cleaned at some level.
The question is whether it was cleaned to the point where the resources of the FBI cannot access what was on there originally.
It's possible to do, but whether it was done or not, we simply don't know.
So forget about criminality for a second.
I mean, obviously it's huge that a potential candidate or the President of the United States is a criminal.
But just ask yourself, is this the level of judgment that we all want in the White House?
Do we really want – you remember the old Charlie Brown cartoon, Pig Pen, the character Pig Pen?
Sure.
He walked around in a cloud of dust all the time.
And that's essentially what Hillary is right now.
She's got these clouds of dust swirling around her, and she's going to walk into the White House with them, assuming that she's not indicted previously.
And is that really what we want for four years or eight years, is all of this stuff swirling around, never concluded, wondering what the Russians and the Chinese know, because they may in fact have access to far more of the emails than you and I will ever see.
Wondering what they know, wondering how that limits Hillary's dealings with them, wondering if someone who displayed such poor judgment really can be entrusted with even more of America's secrets and even more decisions that affect all of our lives.
I don't think so.
All right, Shell, that's Peter Van Buren, formerly with the State Department, obviously knows what he's talking about.
Read him at wementwell.com, and this one is also on the blog at antiwar.com, Intel Agencies, Clinton emails, match top secret documents.
Thanks.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
Take care.
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