When the well of lame excuses runs dry

Somebody needs to tell Hillionaire that she is indeed in real trouble:

Despite weeks of denials, a second review by the originating agencies confirms that Hillary Clinton improperly received Top Secret/compartmented information on her unsecured and unauthorized e-mail server. The New York Times’ Michael Schmidt reported late last nightthat both the CIA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) agree on that point, backing up the referral from two Inspectors General a month ago to the Department of Justice:

A special intelligence review of two emails that Hillary Rodham Clintonreceived as secretary of state on her personal account — including one about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program — has endorsed a finding by the inspector general for the intelligence agencies that the emails contained highly classified information when Mrs. Clinton received them, senior intelligence officials said.

Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign and the State Department disputed the inspector general’s finding last month and questioned whether the emails, which are being released to the public, had been overclassified by an arbitrary process. But the special review — by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — concluded that the emails were “Top Secret,” the highest classification of government intelligence, when they were sent to Mrs. Clinton in 2009 and 2011.

This relates to the original intel-community review of 40 sample e-mails from Hillary’s data, reviewed only after its existence came to light in the Benghazi select committee probe. Hillary received these two e-mails from an unspecified source, but as a cleared member of leadership as well as the originator of the secret system on which it got transmitted and stored, Hillary would have had responsibility to correct this “spillage” when it occurred. If the data came from NGA, which uses satellites to derive intelligence data, then the need to protect the data should have been obvious, especially to a Secretary of State.

Team Hillary and State both responded with further obfuscations. Nick Merrill released a statement on behalf of the campaign citing “bureaucratic infighting among the intelligence community,” but that’s precisely the opposite of this finding. 

Team Hillionaire is going to have to come clean sooner rather than later.