For summer entertainment, nothing has been more fun to watch than Hillary Clinton’s constantly shifting explanations regarding her use of private e-mail as secretary of state.
The capper (so far) came when she tweeted out a link to an article by a former Justice Department official calling those “ridiculous” rules for what counts as classified info “the real Clinton e-mail scandal.”
Her own agency’s security rules were too complicated for her to follow?
Some aide will get axed for sending that one out — but it’s another sign of how desperate for excuses the Clinton camp has grown.
They’re taking their cues from the top. As more and more classified material keeps popping up, Clinton herself has offered increasingly nuanced explanations.
Back at the start, she claimed there was “no classified material” on the thousands of messages sent to and from her private server. Now the State Department has flagged more than 300 e-mails as containing classified information.
Her next explanation: “I did not send classified material, and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified.”
But even that excuse — the material was only classified later — doesn’t hold water.
Reuters reports that its careful examination of the “classified” stamps shows the e-mails are filled with information that, by State Department rules, automatically count as classified — whether or not they’re so marked.
At least 30 e-mail threads hold confidential information from foreign officials — material the former director of the Information Security Oversight Office says is “born classified.”
Sorry: As head of the State Department, Hillary should have known this. Indeed, she’s stressed that she was “certainly well aware” of classification requirements. Yet that “ridiculous rules” tweet still went out.
You see why The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward said this week that the whole mess “reminds me of the Nixon tapes.”
Of course, Clinton’s ever-morphing excuses also bring to mind another scandal — the one that featured her husband’s notorious grand-jury testimony: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”