You've never been allowed to keep classified information (of any level) in your own private custody on purpose or accidentally. This is explicitly taught and expected of you when granted a clearance. For her to be so willfully ignorant is awfully damning of not just her intelligence but her own moral fiber not to mention the classist bias in letting her get away scott free with something that if I had done I would have been in prison almost immediately.
1. your last claim there is factually incorrect. The very people who prosecute violations have repeatedly stated that prosecution is largely hinged upon intent.
2. great, there is a rule about not putting classified info on an unsecured communication network. But then the same rules allow for everyone to use personal unsecured communcation networks and just assume that those people will mentally check themselves 100% of the time without error. This is the problem I'm pointing to. It's the equivalent of telling your kid not to eat all the cookies, while leaving them untended with all of the cookies.
You are making exactly the inference Comey was hoping for, from a political motivation, with this assessment.
Lets recap what was actually said:
110 emails in 52 chains contained classified information. Hillary Clinton was included on only 7 of those chains.
Comey then said that there was "a very small number of the emails... [that] bore markings that indicated the presence of classified information."
At no point was it stated that the 7 chains Clinton was included on were the ones already marked classified. Her statement has always been that she did not send or receive anything marked classified.
This is an assessment of the State Department's email methods, not just Clinton's personal server, and the assessment shows an incredibly poor job at handling classified information in a secure manner. This does not however point towards Clinton actually lying. In fact, the lack of an indictment and Comey's clear intent in parsing these two statements makes a pretty clear inference that there was no event in which Hillary Clinton herself sent or received classified information marked as such in the transmittal. If so we would likely be talking about indictment proceedings.
Beyond that, the classification method used by the FBI is incredibly broad and includes information that should have been classified, but was sent to the State Dept. by foreign officials via similar unsecured networks.
Which brings us back to my original point - we continue to let elected officials and cabinet staff work under the assumption that they'll follow every and all rule despite given limited structure or oversight, and now we're supposed to be surprised that something like this occurred. It's faux outrage at it's finest. Stop allowing any elected official with classified clearance from conducting any form of business over a personal network. Just stop it, period, and reject communication from unsecured networks from foreign allies, forcing them to play by similar rules. It isn't that hard, but the powers that be are more focused on writing rules and guidelines than they are in establishing an effective system that inherently supports obedience to those rules and guidelines.
