The Hillary Clinton Ship of Destiny sails on, despite gaping Emailgate holes appearing above and below the waterline.

Back in August last year I wrote about her already ghastly email problems:

So for me the very fact that Hillary Clinton set up a parallel substantive private email arrangement for much of her official work right when she started working as Secretary of State – obviously to try to avoid subsequent FOI probings over her record – in itself shows that she is morally unfit for office.

Everyone else in the policy chain was paid to be there to serve the public. They accepted responsibility, and that included accepting the likelihood of punishment if they breached vital security rules.

Hillary Clinton by contrast cheated the public, taking a fat salary but not in turn making her work transparent. She was deliberately distancing herself from the very system she was supposed to be leading, merely for her own restless greedy ambition. She took the top job to serve herself.

It seems not to matter how awful her behaviour. The ‘mainstream media’ and the Obama administration either ignore it or purport to explain it away.

How do security classifications work in a modern democracy? Roughly like this.

Documents produced by the state (where documents means almost anything typed up using taxpayer-funded time, equipment and electricity including emails and text messages and policy analyses) are either given a security classification or not. There are different reasons for having such a classification. To give normal civil servants professional confidentiality. To give citizens mentioned in such documents appropriate privacy. To try to stop policy issues ‘leaking’ in an uncontrolled way. To try to stop foreign governments snooping. To protect key sources overseas. And so on.

Many documents will combine different features. If a foreign official gives me as a UK ambassador a frank account of local policy disagreements on a highly sensitive issue, my record of that discussion sent to London may have a reasonably high classification to protect the source, even if the issues themselves are not that immediately important to the UK.

It follows that the documents needing the very highest classification are those involving highly-placed foreigners giving highly sensitive information. You don’t want the foreign government concerned (a) to know that you know exactly what is going on deep in their midst, AND (b) to work out how you got that information. A one-off piece of information (eg a copy of Top Secret Russian nuclear missile plans) is really valuable. A flow of such documents over several years is priceless.

Note that it also follows that even if one document contains innocuous or even unclassified information, the origin of that document or something else in it might give clues to what you are up to in other secret areas, hence it gets a very high classification.

And note that intelligence documents of the highest sensitivity are typically distributed on their own systems, if not in numbered paper copies. It’s not technically possible to copy a highly classified document from a Top Secret system to a lower classification system, at least not without leaving a clear trail of what happened. Unless, of course, someone uses a smartphone to take a screenshot of a Top Secret document, then types the text into a lower classification email: that is easy enough to do, and a trivially obvious criminal offence.

Documents of course can be declassified. That can be done for FOI purposes, or as part of a public enquiry, or just because the reason for giving a document a classification has passed (thus confidential briefing notes for an EU Summit are not worth much after the Summit). Usually that has to be done by the person/organisation that gave the original classification, as they alone are taken to be responsible for knowing exactly why they did so.

In all this there is a simple principle. The classification of a document goes by its substance, not by its markings. A Secret document does not become Unclassified because someone in authority crosses out Secret or ‘tops and tails’ the text by cutting off the classification markings.

If you want more on such issues, read this excellent account of how this all works in detail with different sorts of material having different codewords for different purposes:

The larger point, however, is that, save that last line, absolutely none of the information in this assessment could be released to the public, or placed on any unclassified information system, by anybody, not even a cabinet secretary, without specific approval from outside agencies. The SIGINT, in particular, is highly sensitive and could only be placed in unclassified channels with an explicit NSA (and probably Director of National Intelligence) go-ahead, which is rare.

So, what has Hillary Clinton done wrong? Broadly speaking, everything.

She decided to use a private email server for the bulk of her work as US Secretary of State to avoid any later FOI scrutiny. She then has presided over massive abuse of that server for sending to and fro documents up to and including stratospheric levels of sensitive classification. The Russian and others must have scooped the pool, not believing their luck:

We’ve since learned Ms. Clinton’s “unclassified” emails also included Top Secret information from the Central Intelligence Agency, including espionage from a compartmented Special Access Program. SAPs, as they are called in the Intelligence Community, represent “crown jewel” information. Even for holders of Top Secret Codeword clearances, the highest in the U.S. Government, access to SAPs requires special permissions, on a strict need-to-know basis.

How such highly classified information from both NSA and CIA wound up in Ms. Clinton’s personal email is a messy question that the FBI is currently unravelling. Don’t expect pretty answers. That her staff at Foggy Bottom treated classification as a nuisance is already apparent, and such guidance, which was flagrantly illegal, could only have come from “the boss.”

Just what a sinkhole of secrets the Secretary of State’s office was during President Obama’s first term, when Ms. Clinton occupied that chair, is frighteningly apparent. Allegations are swirling that her staff systematically copied Top Secret Codeword information off separate, just-for-intelligence computer systems and cut-and-pasted it into “unclassified” emails. This, if true, is an unambiguous felony. There is reason to be cautious about this claim, which is unsubstantiated so far, and would indicate a complex degree of intent: moving Top Secret Codeword information into unclassified emails is not simple, rather a multi-step process, and would leave an audit trail.

See this detailed example.

How does Mrs Clinton try to defend herself publicly in this shambles? Through tried and proven Clintonian evasion: successive footling tightly parsed specious formulations that play on subtle but irrelevant distinctions, to avoid answering the core questions:

I did not send emails marked classified

I did not have emails marked classified on my server

There was no classified material in my emails

There was no material classified at the time I sent it

No classified material originated with me

Nothing I did was wrong

I want people to understand that based on what happened when it was happening in real time, there was no classification and that’s what you have to be guided by

This appears to be over-classification run amok

That last one is especially absurd. Hillary Clinton is running to be US Commander in Chief on her experience at the top levels of government for many years. If she had professional concerns about over-classifications ‘running amok’, what did she do about them?

Of course, another interesting question in this absurd situation is what President Obama and the White House knew about all this. Were they too sending to and fro to Hillary and her people on unclassified and insecure channels highly classified material that was not marked as such? Did they know or have good reason to suspect that she was breaking the law, but then did nothing about it?

Hard to imagine not. Which is no doubt another reason why Mrs Clinton will bumble on unprosecuted and unpunished, over and above the laws that bear down heavily on the rest of us.