On 1/27/2016 at 4:12 PM, Fla\/\/ed said:
On 1/27/2016 at 3:27 PM, Ramsay Hunt Experience said:
Do people understand that Hillary Clinton has the authority to declassify documents that originate in the State Department so that they can be shared? This is only an issue if the classification comes from another agency. If some diplomat in State classifies an email and Hillary declassifies it to send it to Sidney Blumenthal, that is perfectly legal. All authority to classify of declassify a State Department document stems through her.
Well then....do you have a link for this and if this is all she did why is this investigation going on by the FBI?
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/85691.pdf
You'll need to read the entire regs, but the long and short of it is that she has the original classification authority, and she also has the highest declassification authority in the department (as you might expect). Also note that in addition to relating to a classifiable subject matter, in order to meet the requirements for classification, the OCA (here, Hillary) must determine that disclosure could reasonably be expected to harm national security in a way that can be identified or described.
I know there is an investigation to determine what originally classified material was on the servers. It's not impossible that she could have improperly declassified another agency's information. Or it's possible that she could have declassified without dotting the Is and crossing the Ts (striking out the original classification as opposed to deleting it etc.). I just find a lot of the coverage of this kind of mystifying. I hear certain people claim that indictments are imminent, but I don't hear that from the NY Times or anything.