In a rare Fox News appearance Monday, Hillary Clinton was confronted by anchor Bret Baier with her March 2015 assertion that "there is no classified material" on her improper, unsecure, national security-compromising email server. Skip ahead to the two-minute mark and watch her defend that utterly false claim. As you watch, recall that more than 2,000 Clinton emails have been deemed classified by the State Department, dozens of which are secret, top secret or above-top secret, and more than 100 of which she personally wrote:
Baier: Can we say definitively that [your 'there is no classified material' statement] is not accurate?
Clinton: No, you can't...
Her subsequent explanation is full of evasions and misdirection. She calls on the deeply misleading "Colin Powell did it too" line, and again claims that none of the information that passed through her vulnerable server was classified at the time. This is verifiably false. Reuters and others have reported that significant numbers of the emails in question were, in fact, classified from the moment they were produced. The nonpartisan Intelligence Community Inspector General has confirmed this fact. Furthermore, highly sensitive intelligence is "born classified," rendering her heavily-parsed "markings" technicality irrelevant. Plus, she signed a binding NDA swearing to safeguard all classified material -- "marked or unmarked" upon taking office:
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
She knows that her incomplete, inaccurate excuse doesn't even apply here, yet she'll keep repeating it because she has few other options. Don't forget that she maintained her scheme -- which she preposterously tries to pass off as nothing out of the ordinary -- even after a top State Department security officer issued a specific warning to her that foreign hackers were targeting powerful US officials' private emails as a method of compromising classified channels. Alas, Hillary's private server was already awash in classified information. And then there's this clarifying observation from Jonah Goldberg:
Of course nothing @HillaryClinton sent was marked classified. She set up a stealth system that was outside the classification system.
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) March 7, 2016
Exactly. Her evolving explanations fail at virtual every level. Before you go, read former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy explaining why the "not marked" explanation may actually be more incriminating for Clinton, and flaying the spin that David Petraeus' violations were worse than Hillary's. I'll leave you with Fox's Catherine Herridge fact checking additional elements of Clinton's answers: