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Gross negligence and extreme carelessness are not the same. Gross negligence is a conscious and voluntary disregard of the need to use reasonable care. Clinton

Gross negligence and extreme carelessness are not the same. Gross negligence is a conscious and voluntary disregard of the need to use reasonable care. Clinton clearly understood the need for reasonable care as she took some security measures and asked people not to email her confidential materials. She merely did a poor job executing on the knowledge that care was needed, which in this case is not actually illegal (especially when grave harms did not occur, which is an additional legal factor). The laws are written around consent because the goal of the law is to enable punishment of people who intend to harm the US government. Note that Comey said that it's the individual's responsibility to know when material is confidential, even if that is not marked. Yet even information that is widely reported on in the media can still be considered confidential. The law is written to protect those who take "careless" or "negligent" actions in light of the difficulty of the task of maintaining confidentiality during the kind of extensive communications required to execute the business of government.

DominikR 10y ago
I'm not convinced by this, especially when I see emails from Sec. Clinton like these: https://sli.mg/gHT80S https://sli.mg/gHT80S Someone had issues sending her a secure fax and she replied that he should send it nonpaper and unsecure and to make it even worse - remove the identifying header (classified, secret, top secret and so on) This is intent in my view. Not to harm the US, but to ignore the law because it's more convenient to her.
- daughart 10y ago
  That's not clear at all -- there's no evidence that information was classified in the first place, but moreover a request to convert to "nonpaper" refers to sending a written summary or briefing. Jake Sullivan is no fool, he's a law professor at Yale. It is equally reasonable to assume that the request to send nonsecure includes an implicit request to not include confidential materials in the "nonpaper" version. Rational and intelligent actors could be assumed to act in a legal way based on this legal request.

DominikR 10y ago

I'm not convinced by this, especially when I see emails from Sec. Clinton like these: https://sli.mg/gHT80S https://sli.mg/gHT80S Someone had issues sending her a secure fax and she replied that he should send it nonpaper and unsecure and to make it even worse - remove the identifying header (classified, secret, top secret and so on) This is intent in my view. Not to harm the US, but to ignore the law because it's more convenient to her.

daughart 10y ago
That's not clear at all -- there's no evidence that information was classified in the first place, but moreover a request to convert to "nonpaper" refers to sending a written summary or briefing. Jake Sullivan is no fool, he's a law professor at Yale. It is equally reasonable to assume that the request to send nonsecure includes an implicit request to not include confidential materials in the "nonpaper" version. Rational and intelligent actors could be assumed to act in a legal way based on this legal request.