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Notes -
So after Sec Def Hegseth denied posting classified info in the leaked Signal chat, the Atlantic has released more screenshots of him describing the full play-by-play warplan:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/signal-group-chat-attack-plans-hegseth-goldberg/682176/
Also, looks like it might have been Waltz's deputy Alex Wong who accidentally e-vited Goldberg to the chat:
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1904883964072124642
What gets me is that none of this even matters anymore, so I don't get the big deal made over it.
When you've refused to concede a national election, your supporters have stormed the central seat of government, and you've then not only been allowed to run again but been resoundingly re-elected, why would something like this be even a ripple? I'm surprised even right-wing rags like the NY Post have this at the top. What do they think will be the outcome of any of this? Trump already said he's not firing Waltz. The GOP will remain dutifully silent. The public sure as shit don't care.
Yeah, in 2012, this would've been career-ending for everyone involved, but these are different times. Absolutely nothing comes of this.
What makes this classified information? The actual targets were not specified.
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'Accidentally'
If Loomer here is not making this up wholly, hiring Wong was a colossally wrong move. His wife was reliable enough to prosecute J6ers, he worked for a big law company favorited by Democrats.
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This incident strikes me as kind of a perfect banality.
Its one of the most boring "scandals" of all time. What did we learn?
High level Trump officials use signal instead of, or in addition to regular texts for discussing topics relevant to their job. We already knew they were using something, now we know its signal. Maybe that will change. Maybe it will cause some foia headaches. Overall, big yawn.
Someone in this circle was incompetent, apparently someone on Waltz's staff. Well, not even really incompetent. He/she basically did a fatfinger and gave the boss the wrong number. Yawn, with an asterisk.
Vance is less hawkish than the rest of the inner circle relating to defense. Already public info.
The administration isn't lying in public about thinking Europe is a bunch of weenies. Confirming more public info.
Jeffery Goldberg is a fabulist that exaggerates. Also already public info.
Jeffery Goldberg isn't evil enough to leak military information he has until after the OP is done. Honestly, this is new information. Before this story I would have been close to 50/50 on whether he would jeopardize a strike in the middle east for a story.
The only way this story is really A STORY is if 2 is a lie, and this was an op. That is, the staffer is a turncoat, or there was some FBI/CIA/NSA interference that resulted in Goldberg getting added, or something else. So as it is, the story as reported is quite boring. Everyone acknowledged the conversation was real fairly quickly, its contents are basically uncontroversial, and sometimes downright encouraging (I can't imagine Kamala and Lloyd Austin texting about the actual pros/cons of bombing Houthis in a productive and substantial manner). The security flaw, having been identified can now be rectified with either a more secure app, some additional protocols, etc. In the end, the administration got a little lucky, but the great thing about getting lucky is you dont take a loss, and yet you still get to learn LIKE you got a loss. If you are smart. And I think at least a number of people in the Trump admin are smart enough to coach a high school sports team, which is all the smarts you need.
This is inverse TDS. Leaking the time and details of a military strike to a completely random person is bad! The sheer level of incompetence necessary for nobody to have checked that everyone in the chat was who they thought they were before sending the 'strike in two hours' message is insane! This is the kind of behavior that gets military secrets leaked to enemies. Apparently I hold my discord groupchats to a higher standard of security than freaking Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz do.
The incompetence was swiftly acknowledged. Which is why its not going to be a longrunning story.
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Even if Signal is a secure app, a chat isn't secure unless you know who everyone in the chat is. There were 20 people in the chat if you count Goldberg, and a lot of them were only identified by initials or first names. Frankly, a chat being labelled as "small group" and having 20 people in it should be a yellow flag - 20 isn't a small group as anyone who has been in a ftf meeting with 20 people in the room would understand.
Hegseth posted nonpublic information about future military operations (I am not going to go into the weeds as to whether it was actually classified under the relevant executive orders - it affects neither the actual severity of the fuckup nor any potential criminal liability under the Espionage Act) to a chat without checking who was in the room. Doing that at a bank would get your bonus docked for a material compliance breach, and would probably be a firing offence if you did it twice.
It feels like this story is bigger than it needs to be because Team Trump keeps saying silly things in an attempt to avoid admitting that Waltz and Hegseth did the dumb. The best defence is "Two new political appointees made an OPSEC mistake due to inexperience. Fortunately Jonah Goldberg handled the situation responsibly and no harm was done. Now let's get back to talking about the American people's priorities."
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Well yeah, because enormous things are at stake, and the choices are binary. We don’t have the luxury to care about inconsequential matters when the binary is so consequential. The very nature of the country is at stake: demographics, who becomes the eternal national villain. Any public criticism of Trump makes Republicans less likely to win in the future. And conservatives want Republicans to win. I’m sure if I were a radical transgender, or a black nationalist, I would feel the same way but in the other direction. What you’re asking is essentially —
— and the answer is simple: they want to win. I’m sure there’s a lot of criticism internally, but why would an influencer countersignal their own army here? Is the middle of a battle the right time to loudly denounce Napoleon?
The individual that is doing the most to make Republicans less likely to win in the future is Trump.
Certainly, there’s no Democrat even remotely effectual at this goal.
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Because in the popular culture narrative the Republicans and Trump specifically went full retard over Hillary's private email server, and it was all a nothingburger. So now the shoe is on the other foot and liberals are having an orgasm.
Yes in actuality, Hillary's thing was not a complete nothingburger. The events are not really comparable and Hillary did some actual corrupt things around turning her emails over but that's why this is a big deal if you're trying to score points against red tribe.
What were they? I didn't pay attention at the time.
Something like
Authority: Clinton, you must turn your private email server contents over immediately
Clinton: I will have my lawyer do this
Lawyer: here ya go! sorry it took a bit
Authority: it looks like tons of emails are missing
Lawyer: oh, yes. Clinton has a bunch of personal email intermixed with official email, so I looked through it and only turned over her official stuff
Authority: no, give us everything
Lawyer: lol can't do that. I deleted everything that wasn't official business based on my criteria for what was official and what wasn't
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What stands out to me is that twice in the thread they mention OPSEC
And
I don't know outside of them straight up texting "This topic is sensitive and shouldn't be available to the outside" if you could get any closer to expressing that very idea. They literally say it's something they're taking OPSEC measures on, it's a hard sell to me that it's not a security breach then.
It reads like larping honestly. Like when you see "opsec" being thrown around on gun forums and such.
Agreed, to me it doesn’t read like a real conversation at all. Lots of unnecessary elaboration when the principle in a chat like this should be to relay only minimal, relevant, actionable information for all concerned.
My favorite part is the sycophantic commenting on Europe by Hegseth. Vance: “Please talk more about how you hate Europe and bicycles.”
Makes me wonder if pissing off Europe was the whole point.
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Your sneering aside, it does seem like Goldberg overstated what was on the chat (ie no specific details of where the launches would occur from, who they’d attack, where they’d attack). A war plan this was not.
But it did describe timing which is bad.
It depends on whether this is all there is or if he has more. By holding the story until key players would be testifying under oath within 24 hours and thereby forcing them on the record under oath before the administration could coordinate their response, Goldberg has already shown a degree of savviness beyond simply reporting the story straight up. There's a possibility he's just doing this one step at a time to elicit excuses like the one you've just given , only for those excuses to fall flat once more comes out.
Sure it’s possible. But given his general history not sure that’s the most reasonable interpretation
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Thing is, the SECDEF is the authority for classification of that kind of stuff. So if he says it's not classified, it's not classified. Now, obviously, it was pretty damned reckless to be posting a mission timeline to an insecure group chat before the mission took place, but classification wasn't a problem.
"Oops, we accidentally invited an uncleared individual into the chat, so I'll use my OCA powers to say nothing we said was classified" is not how it works. He can undoubtedly get away with it, but there is not one person defending this as a nothingburger who wouldn't be outraged if it had been Democrats who did this. (Indeed, I suspect that the Venn diagram of "This Signal chat is a nothingburger drummed up by the Fake News" and "Hillary should have gone to prison for her private server" is practically a circle.)
It was intended to be an unclassified chat, so the presence of the uncleared individual actually doesn't figure into whether saying something that should have been classified was some sort of violation. But the OCA can say it's not classified even if it should have been; that IS how it works.
I've seen people who defended this as a nothingburger AND said Hillary's was a nothingburger too.
Personally I agree with whoever said the was a "veggieburger". Hillary's was still worse -- her violation was deliberate and systematic. And information that's been coming out has made this incident even less significant; the recommendation to use Signal for this sort of thing came out during the Biden administration, so this isn't some sort of Trumpy dumbness. I don't see how to square that with the Federal Records Act, but maybe there's a way. Which leaves two problems. Inviting the journalist, which was presumably an ordinary screw up, and including the timeline and perhaps the assessment of European capabilities. The timeline would have been a problem if they'd invited Aziz Nasirzadeh to the chat; fortunately they didn't. The assessment of European capabilities, without any supporting details, is of fairly low value.
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I thought that was the president, not secdef that had ultimate classification authority.
Correct, the SecDef's classification authority is not "ultimate". It is "original" however.
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It was reckless. There should be some internal accounting. But the details aren’t as bad as what JG intimated and the timing was shortly before the mission started.
This is still a black eye but not as bad as some thought.
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For the record, the current stance of Catturd and the Trump administration is that this entire thing is a "hoax". Although what "hoax" means here is unclear -- the direct statement occurred in regards to whether the leaks were "war plans" or "attack plans", with the latter wording being perceived as a huge admission of guilt from the media by the Trump defenders. "Hoax" could also simply mean "thing I don't like"... so who knows?
The "Hoax" is two-fold.
It is now clear that the original claim about "Administration officials leaking classified war-plans" was (at a minimum) grossly overstated if not outright false.
In addition, we (the general public) are being asked to believe that the same people who voted for Clinton in 2016 and who supported keeping the nuclear football in the hands of a dementia patient for the last 3+ years, are now "genuinely and deeply concerned" about operational and national security. NOT just reaching for anything they can use to attack the outgroup because Orange Man Bad.
I don't see how that's hard to believe at all. I trust Biden with the nuclear football infinitely more than Hegseth, Trump, Vance, or any of the people in that group chat. Biden may have dementia, but at least he was competent at one point, and at least he's aware of his limitations and would surround himself with advisers who can help him make the right decisions. I am genuinely and deeply concerned that immediate national security issues are being discussed in a group chat where random people are invited.
Are you being sincere about this or exaggerating for effect? Biden was fully senile at the end, and it’s really not clear when in his term he crossed that line. I’m not so sure he was aware of his limitations, either. Trusting him over Trump I frankly can understand, Trump is erratic and underinformed and is himself clearly losing his sharpness with age (although I wouldn’t call him fully senile, yet). But Vance, for example, doesn’t seem any less competent than any other run-of-the-mill politician, he’s not even a hawk. I would absolutely trust him above Biden to make decisions in a crisis. Unless you mean you’d trust Biden’s advisors to steer him the right way when the shit hits the fan?
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Deplorable transparency. If only the state would hide its inner workings more thoroughly from its citizens!
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Citation needed
Low effort. I can guess which statement in the above post you are referring to, but you don't even quote it, and if you did it would just be making a snarky one-line quip. If all you have to say is "Nuh uh" it probably isn't worth the keystrokes.
So was the above post.
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Citation of what exactly?
Take for example “Biden was once competent.” Famously Obama said don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things. Has Biden been right about literally anything in FP for years?
The initial post was pure aesthetic (ie Biden, a long time Washington guy, is “very serious” and therefore competent).
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Genuinely trying to understand your points here.
For 1, how is this grossly exaggerated or substantially false?
For 2, is there some relevance here? This seems like the generic laundry list of sneers right-populists use against the media, for which I agree with Scott and Hanania. I can agree with limited claims that the media will often spin and misrepresent. But the media brought receipts. They have screenshots, and from what I can tell, nobody's really saying the screenshots are faked.
For 1, the screenshots have born the theories of more skeptical users from the previous threads like @Dean and @Setulla out. If anything they were being generous
For 2, it demonstrates that the demand for rigor is isolated. The media is niether good nor honest, CMV.
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I can’t believe the Trump team has only been in power for a few months now. It already feels like a years worth of events have happened.
It’s going to be a looooong presidential term. Buckle up.
That's because of information warfare.
Look, you think the Biden White House wasn't an absolute fucking shit show? They kept a lid on his dementia the entire time, and only after the debate did three years of stories all deluge the news all at once. Imagine a hostile media and a hostile deep state, instead of keeping a tight lid on all these stories, leaking about the naked incompetence of the president for 3 years straight. If instead of attacking people pointing out the moments when Biden was obviously demented in public, accusing them of hateful rhetoric and making fun of the poor president's stutter, they uncritically amplified them?
I don't want to say it's all fake. It's not. But your perception is being heavily abused.
What, I thought we all knew about it already, even most Democrats knew but didn't want to admit it. Just the media apparatus always stays on message so they would never dare to publish anything dirty until permission is granted.
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I'm sorry, no, Trump's just being retarded. This isn't, like, an innate property of being right wing or anything. If Curtis Yarvin got to choose the top 50 people in the Trump admin, it'd be different. (Or so I'd like to think...) But, no, Biden didn't send innocent people to a prison in El Salvador, and then pretend it's a state secret so he doesn't have to tell a judge who they are. He doesn't randomly Truth out new completely pointless tariffs twice a week. (I'm not huge on tariffs, but I am a fan of targeted and competent state intervention in the economy, and you could use tariffs in such a way. That's not what Trump's doing). When Biden did something truly insane (announcing the Equal Rights Amendment was in force), everyone basically ignored it, instead of agreeing and amplifying.
I think people are overstating the total impact of Trump's direct actions a bit. Most of them don't matter that much, other than USAID closure (which will, if it lasts, really counterfactually kill millions of people over a decade), tariffs (trump take bitcoin :(( ). But that's mostly just because Trump's only one branch of a three-branch government designed to restrict the whims of politicians and the power of a single election, Republicans have tiny majorities in the second branch that can't get anything done in normal circumstances, and he's not even pretending to follow precedent, which makes things tough for the third branch. The actions Trump is taking, judged relative to their potential impact, are mostly just stupid. Biden would not have launched Biden Coin.
Your bias is showing. Biden's DOJ went after J6'ers so hard they got thrown in solitary confinement and had exculpating evidence hid from trial because apparently the security footage proving their innocence was a "state secret". Biden's regulatory apparatus would randomly exterminate American businesses left and right. Happened to Juul, crypto, energy sectors, etc. To say nothing of the countless red lines Biden put on the Ukraine/Russia conflict or the Israel/Palestine conflict that just got blown right past to no consequence what so ever.
Talking about classified intel, does nobody else remember the leaks of classified info on Discord during the Biden admin? Or the various other high profile leaks?
I'm saying your perceptions are being abused because yes, the Biden administration was just as retarded. Pete Buttigieg was just as retarded when Boeing planes were falling out of the sky, trains were derailing causing permanent ecological damage and bridges were collapsing. Their fucking AWOL secretary of defense was just as retarded when he vanished for months while WWIII was breaking out, telling nobody. The emergency response to Western North Carolina was pants on head retarded.
And these are just the stories we know about that broke through! Largely isolated to an online news ghetto full of people going "Can you believe this fucking shit?!" But now you have the MSM, as well as the online news ghetto going "Can you believe this fucking shit?!" and that tricks your perception into thinking it's somehow more retarded. It's not. What you had before was professional liars and people trying to fairly call balls and strikes. During the Biden admin the profession liars constantly tried to bring the temperature down. Now they are trying to raise it. The independent media trying to fairly call balls and strikes generally think the last 8 years have been completely retarded. But all you see is that 50% of the news thought Biden was retarded, and now 100% thinks Trump is retarded, therefore Trump is worse than Biden. You are still letting the professional liars influence your perception.
I'm very right-wing! I might be biased against Trump (I don't think so), but I'm definitely not biased against right wing policies.
Link? I was unable to find anything like this from google searches like "january 6 evidence prosecution state secret".
Crypto is basically a combination of regulatory arbitrage for moderately more efficient finance and an unregulated trillion dollar global casino. I don't think the Biden admin's regulation on crypto made sense, but it's difficult to argue against harsh regulation.
Biden did not exterminate the energy sector. As Matt Yglesias always says, US oil production hit all-time highs under Biden. And that's despite the dumb lockdowns.
The Juul ban was probably dumb, but that doesn't seem out of distribution for dumb things every administration does, either in terms of competence or overall impact.
Again, this isn't ideal, but Trump's foreign policy (for example claims of annexing Gaza) is hardly consistent either. It's not out of distribution. Telling Canadian leaders in a private call that you want to renegotiate the treaty about our border ... is. That's the kind of thing that I said above - it's out-of-distribution retarded, even though the impact is minor.
Random people leak things sometimes. There are millions of people with access to classified info. That doesn't really implicate the Biden admin's decisionmaking, unlike this.
... vanished for months? I only remember a 'disappearance' of few days for an operation, and a few more announced operations later. I googled for it and can't find anything about months. That wasn't great, but you may be overstating it.
(And having a DEI hire who is at least an experienced military commander who's gone for a few days, while suboptimal is better than someone whose possession of the job is entirely counterfactual to being a fox news host).
So your examples aren't persuasive. None of them are anywhere near 'sending innocent people to a jail in El Salvador without due process, while intentionally ambiguously violating a court order' and 'being so incompetent that you have lower standards than El Salvador, who sent back women (it's a men's only prison, somehow they didn't know that) and a Nicaraguan (because it'd be a disaster for them to randomly imprison a citizen of a neighboring country).' Which, as acknowledged above, doesn't matter at all in the greater scheme of things - but it's incredibly stupid.
Not unless your every post here is a devil's advocate exercise.
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I mean sure, there’s always a lot more wailing and gnashing of teeth when Trump is in office, but the stories mostly hasn’t been from leaks. It’s been the shit ton of executive orders being written en masse at a historically unprecedented rate, plus a lot of moves to fulfill election promises. The one big leak story happened because Waltz somehow added the CHIEF EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC to a cabinet group chat. You’re correct that Biden faced very little pushback in mainstream coverage, but Trumps term is coming out swinging hard. You can argue it’s a good thing, but you can’t argue there’s not a lot happening all at once.
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I was going to say the same. I distinctly remember hearing from someone that Obama never had a scandal, and I realized it was because the press never made anything a scandal. Cash for Clunkers was an expensive boondoggle that only succeeded in destroying perfectly good durable goods and wasted money doing it. Eric Holder ran guns to Mexican cartels. He droned an American citizen, and the IRS targeted his political adversaries. Any of these could have been a true scandal, if the press treated it as such.
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I think that the shitshow-level of the current administration is appreciably larger than the last, both in frequency and spectacle. Trump administration fuck ups often do have some parallels to fuck ups from previous administrations, but more often than not, the comparisons obscure just how strange some of these people act.
It’s not just the fuck up, but the whole response: total refusal to accept any responsibility, blatant lying about what happened, the defensiveness, which comes off as childish rather than masculine. None of this is surprising, given that Trump filled his administration this time around with sycophants and media personalities. It makes for great TV though.
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Hm? Circa 2012 a leading candidate / political official's career was notably not ended over a significantly more egregious case, and the politician in question didn't even have original classification authority to declassify topics if she wanted to. It was in fact characterized as election interference to acknowledge investigations into the issue, even as non-prosecution agreements were used as preconditions for testimony on factors like destruction of evidence of the affair. And that was in an era where partisans confronting officials in the central seat of government, including elevators and bathrooms, was still considered legitimate protest.
As it turns out, if a political party wins the political argument that blatant security violations aren't disqualifying, they win the political argument that blatant security violations aren't disqualifying. Particularly if they later try and fail to selectively disqualify political opponents on lesser mishandlings, further weakening the premise of the prohibition.
Benghazi (including the e-mail thing, which at the time was being treated, including by Hilary's opponents, as a process crime covering up Benghazi) was the main story of the last three months of Hilary's tenure as Secretary of State. She held no elected or appointed office between retiring as SoS and running for President, and the e-mail story ended up derailing her Presidential campaign. I think it is fair to say that her career was ended over the issue.
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Who are you talking about?
Clinton (Hillary)
I suspected but didn't want to assume.
Why do you think she didn't have Original Classification Authority?
Because the specific documents that set the whole email-server scandal in motion were classified intelligence reports from the Department of Defense. Hillary was the Secretary of State.
I've never seen that claim before signalgate. Source?
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At risk of being viewed as trying to claim that it's (R)ifferent, my understanding is that information is scoped underneath the individuals with OCA. That is, suppose there are two agencies, each with a head who has OCA. Agency Head 1 determines that Information X is classified at the Y level. This is not a complete prohibition on sharing; it just needs to be approved by the appropriate channels. That is, in order to share it with Agency 2, there is a process which concludes that Agency 1 is cool with sharing Information X with (at least some parts of) Agency 2. However, the OCA "follows" Information X. When it's written down, it contains markings which say that it was Originally Classified By Agency 1, saying that if Agency 2 wants to share it any further, they must get approval from Agency 1. This is my understanding mostly from seeing Snowden leak documents with these kinds of markings and declassified stuff with these markings crossed out.
I believe that one of the problems with what Hillary did was that they were routing information through her private server that had been Originally Classified By some other agency. Now, if every item was, in fact, Originally Classified By her at State, then there's a slightly better argument that she has the authority to do what she wants with it. It would still be a colossal fuck-up in many ways, but it would make it slightly harder to prosecute her. (FWIW, I was on record as being on Team No Indict long long long ago when all this went down, in significant part because it seemed like there would be difficulties with securing a conviction.) Similarly here, if we suppose that what SECDEF shared was completely generated by and would have been Originally Classified By DoD, then his authority is at its strongest, and it makes prosecution harder. Most of the rules are for the "little people", so unless a principal is bandying about with information that was Originally Classified By someone else (or like straight selling secrets to foreigners or whatever), they're probably not getting prosecuted. Of course, it's still a colossal fuck-up in many ways here too.
Do you have a source for this claim that the documents at issue in her case were classified outside of state?
Some IGs claimed it:
Also, reading the inside baseball a bit on Comey's statement:
I read that to imply that it wasn't just State. Also:
Traditionally, State isn't part of the IC.
That's fair. Thanks!
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I don't think Hillary ever claimed the documents in question weren't classified on that basis. And I don't think they were publicly released like these seem to have been. I'm not sure it would have gone more smoothly if she had, either.
Hilary claimed, and the FBI investigation found insufficient evidence to refute, that she had set up the private e-mail server for her unclassified e-mail and that the small amounts of classified e-mail found on it were inadvertent.
And yet the FBI also found that classified information was routinely emailed from that server to staffers personal (ie non-government) email accounts and devices without encryption.
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