The formula here is neither imaginative nor subtle -- ignore the question, pivot to Republicans, attack Trump. Watch as CNN's Jim Sciutto tries in vain to coax any semblance of an answer out of this DNC flack, who has clearly been trained like a seal to respond to any unhelpful question about the Democratic frontrunner with some variation of "but Trump," which
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In fairness, Mr. Paustenbach's approach, while ham-fisted, may still have been superior to President Obama's choices in reacting to these sorts of inquiries. After sharing his preemptive judgment last year that Hillary Clinton hadn't broken any laws with her improper, national security-compromising email scheme, the White House was forced to walk back Obama's comments. He wasn't influencing an active investigation being conducted by an arm of the executive branch, we were assured. Then, when asked again about the controversy on Fox News Sunday, the president again delivered a verdict -- expressing confidence that Clinton was at worst guilty of a little carelessness, and sniffing that much of the material on her unsecure private server wasn't, you know, classified classified. Some points: (1) Notice how the Obama White House can be rather choosey indeed regarding which ongoing proceedings they will, or will not, wade into. Psychopath Kermit Gosnell's den of illegal abortions and murder? Can't comment. The FBI's apparently still-expanding criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton? Many comments. The aforementioned Free Beacon also noticed this unevenly-applied standard earlier this year:
(2) The act of setting up an rules-violating private email server was not "careless." It was deliberate. The
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(3) One of the dumbest staples of Hillary's self-defense, parroted by Obama over the weekend, involves lamenting the scourge of "over-classification." The way the story goes, the US government goes way overboard when it comes to determining what information might need to be classified on some level, resulting in a problematic glut of "secret" information that really needn't be treated as such. There may be some merit to that argument, which, in turn, could conceivably apply to the majority of work-related emails discovered on Hillary's server (excluding the 30,000-plus "personal" messages she and her lawyers deleted with no oversight, some of which have been discovered to apply to her work after all) that were listed as "confidential," the lowest classification level. But we know that dozens of her emails were, in fact, classified at the levels of 'secret,' 'top secret' and even '
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(4) Because the White House is still regurgitating the "marked/stamped classified" line, let's repeat: Those emails weren't marked classified because they were passing through -- and in many cases, originating in -- Hillary's bootleg server. There were no formal markings because
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This one line in Clinton's NDA completely destroys her "wasn't marked classified" defense https://t.co/zPn1Ifbe6Q pic.twitter.com/jSWXTDzNtr
— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) November 9, 2015
And the Obama-appointed nonpartisan intelligence community Inspector General has formally affirmed what other experts and officials have stated repeatedly: Intelligence that rises to the level of 'top secret' is unambiguously and patently "born classified." No markings required. And yet the mendacious spin never ceases.
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