THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWSPAPER FINALLY ISSUES A CORRECTION:
An earlier version of this article and an earlier headline, using information from senior government officials, misstated the nature of the referral to the Justice Department regarding Hillary Clinton's personal email account while she was secretary of state. The referral addressed the potential compromise of classified information in connection with that personal email account. It did not specifically request an investigation into Mrs. Clinton.
This is what happens when you suck information directly from Trey Gowdy's member -- er, I mean Benghazi committee member Trey Gowdy.
OH LOOK, ANOTHER ONE:
The Hill: Top Dem denies criminal probe of Clinton’s emails :
"I spoke personally to the State Department Inspector General on Thursday, and he said he never asked the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation of Secretary Clinton's email usage,” Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on Benghazi, saidFriday in a statement.
Instead, Steve Linick, State’s Inspector Ggeneral “told me the Intelligence Community IG notified the Justice Department and Congress that they identified classified information in a few emails that were part of the [Freedom of Information Act] review, and that none of those emails had been previously marked as classified."
YET ANOTHER UPDATE:
The NYT changed the target of a criminal probe from HRC to those handling her email without a correction? http://t.co/vpXexgKcoW
— Joan Walsh (@joanwalsh) July 24, 2015
EVEN MORE UPDATE via the WSJ:
The inspector general’s office concluded that Mrs. Clinton should have used a secure network to transmit the emails in question—rather than her personal email account run off a home server.
“None of the emails we reviewed had classification or dissemination markings, but some included IC-derived classified information and should have been handled as classified, appropriately marked, and transmitted via a secure network,” wrote Inspector General I. Charles McCullough in the letter to Congress.
The emails in question left government custody and are on both Mrs. Clinton’s personal home email sever as well as a thumb drive of David Kendall, Mrs. Clinton’s personal attorney.
MORE UPDATE:
The Department of Justice now correcting their earlier statement & saying the referral regarding Clinton emails was not a criminal inquiry.
— Sari Horwitz (@SariHorwitz) July 24, 2015
UPDATE: Look at the original lede!
Original @NYTimes Clinton email lede vs. rewritten lede pic.twitter.com/5yPkev3JNS
— Daily Kos Elections (@DKElections) July 24, 2015
As we know, the New York Times newspaper is a teeny bit obsessed with finding criminal behavior by Hillary Clinton -- one might even say it's a fatal attraction. So yet another unnamed government official releases a memo from two unnamed Inspectors General in an administration still riddled with Bush holdovers, and we are meant to get outraged on demand. Yet, as even the Times admits, the "classified" mail wasn't classified at the time -- so now I am forgetting the thing I am supposed to get outraged about!
WASHINGTON — Two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of state, senior government officials said Thursday.
The request follows an assessment in a June 29 memo by the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence agencies that Mrs. Clinton’s private account contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.” The memo was written to Patrick F. Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management.
It is not clear if any of the information in the emails was marked as classified by the State Department when Mrs. Clinton sent or received them.
But since her use of a private email account for official State Department business was revealed in March, she has repeatedly said that she had no classified information on the account.
The initial revelation has been an issue in the early stages of her presidential campaign.
The Justice Department has not decided if it will open an investigation, senior officials said. A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign declined to comment.
At issue are thousands of pages of State Department emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private account. Mrs. Clinton has said she used the account because it was more convenient, but it also shielded her correspondence from congressional and Freedom of Information Act requests.
She faced sharp criticism after her use of the account became public, and subsequently said she would ask the State Department to release her emails.
The department is now reviewing some 55,000 pages of emails. A first batch of 3,000 pages was made public on June 30.
In the course of the email review, State Department officials determined that some information in the messages should be retroactively classified. In the 3,000 pages that were released, for example, portions of two dozen emails were redacted because they were upgraded to “classified status.” But none of those were marked as classified at the time Mrs. Clinton handled them.
In a second memo to Mr. Kennedy, sent on July 17, the inspectors general said that at least one email made public by the State Department contained classified information. The inspectors general did not identify the email or reveal its substance.
The memos were provided to The New York Times by a senior government official.
