Those "top secret" emails? They were about drone strikes. It's all bullshit.
As Fred Kaplan pointed out in Slate, 7 of the 8 Top Secret email chains found on Clinton's server were about CIA drone strikes, and the other one was about that ultra-important geopolitical hotspot that is Malawi.
But there's more. As Kaplan says, the CIA drone strikes in Pakistan are only "Top Secret" for political reasons. We're technically not supposed to be doing it, but everyone knows we are, so to keep up appearances, we have to pretend that we're not, hence "Top Secret." It's more or less the equivalent of Israel having nuclear weapons -- everyone knows about it, but officially everyone has to pretend they don't know. You can read about the drone strikes in the NYTimes, but if two government officials discuss them, it has to be classified.
What's more, as the Wall Street Journal previously reported, Clinton didn't initiate the drone strike discussion, it was started by American diplomats in Pakistan. Hillary later ended up getting copied, through no action or fault of her own. And, in case anyone needs reminding, the fact that she had her own email server is entirely irrelevant here, transmitting classified information over email is what breaks the rules. In fact, unlike the state.gov, which suffered a huge documented breach, there is no evidence that Hillary's server was ever hacked.
But hold on, you argue, isn't Hillary responsible for the lax security culture that resulted in diplomats discussing a "top secret" drone program that the entire world already knew about on non-secure email? Well, maybe, but no more than either of her predecessors, who also used private emails, and also had similarly classified information found on them. In the incident described by the WSJ, though, the diplomats didn't use email out of carelessness, they used email because there was time pressure, and they didn't have access to secure communications. As a result their email messages were "vaguely worded" as the WSJ describes. It wasn't carelessness, it was a judgement call, which given the circumstances, seems to be the correct one.
The more you dig into the email thing, the less it becomes. As Colin Powell once commented, the solution is just to release all the emails, even the "top secret" ones, so everyone can see just how innocuous they really are, and also how much overclassification goes on. It's frankly outrageous that Comey, a Republican, would break FBI rules in order to give his personal opinion on Hillary's non-criminal use of emails, and particularly to speculate without evidence that she may have been hacked, while neglecting to mention that the email system he thinks she should have been using actually was hacked.
But I guess it's too much to expect from the media to cover the Clintons with any kind of honesty. Oh, well, she's still going to win.
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