AP has an article on the Hillary Clinton email scandal that is a prime example of why we sometimes feel that much of journalism is just an auxiliary to one side's campaign staff:
For starters, for outgoing email you write yourself, there won't be markings if you didn't put them there. It is your responsibility to mark. For incoming material, how do you know it's classified without markings? The same way the person who should have put the markings knows to put them. If your job is dealing with classified information, you have a responsibility to have some basic familiarity with the criteria, at least enough to ask someone if you are not sure.
Experts in government secrecy law see almost no possibility of criminal action against Hillary Clinton or her top aides in connection with now-classified information sent over unsecure email while she was secretary of state, based on the public evidence thus far.The picture is not nearly as clear as that first paragraph implies.* * *By contrast [to the Petraeus and Deutch cases], there is no evidence of emails stored in Hillary Clinton's private server bearing classified markings. State Department officials say they don't believe that emails she sent or received included material classified at the time. And even if other government officials dispute that assertion, it is extremely difficult to prove anyone knowingly mishandled secrets.
"How can you be on notice if there are no markings?" said Leslie McAdoo, a lawyer who frequently handles security-clearance cases.
For starters, for outgoing email you write yourself, there won't be markings if you didn't put them there. It is your responsibility to mark. For incoming material, how do you know it's classified without markings? The same way the person who should have put the markings knows to put them. If your job is dealing with classified information, you have a responsibility to have some basic familiarity with the criteria, at least enough to ask someone if you are not sure.
And waaaay down at the bottom we have this:
See my earlier posts here and here and Bill's here.
Update: James Taranto at the WSJ has a similar impression of the AP story. After discussing an op-ed by a Clinton donor, Taranto says, "Last night the Associated Press published its own version of the Tompkins op-ed, raising the excuse to the level of purportedly objective journalism," quoting the lead paragraph of the story.
But another law could be relevant. Under the Federal Records Act, destroying official records can be a crime. Clinton ordered around 32,000 emails deleted from her server because she said they were personal. The server was then wiped, making the emails unretrievable.That's a small "if." Out of 32,000 emails we can be very confident that a good number of them are stored on government servers or backups somewhere. That is, we can except for those of us who believe that all 32,000 really were about wedding plans, etc., and I would like to speak to them about a bridge I have for sale.
"If one person has a copy of one of those deleted emails, and it was about government business, the whole game changes," said Kel McClanahan, a lawyer and expert in government records.
See my earlier posts here and here and Bill's here.
Update: James Taranto at the WSJ has a similar impression of the AP story. After discussing an op-ed by a Clinton donor, Taranto says, "Last night the Associated Press published its own version of the Tompkins op-ed, raising the excuse to the level of purportedly objective journalism," quoting the lead paragraph of the story.
This is a joke. It's small wonder that Hillary "Cattle Futures" Clinton wants Citizens United to be overturned. With press lapdogs like that, of course Hillary wants to silence other voices with criminal penalties (see Notablogger, it's germane).