From Mock Paper Scissors:
Way back, when I had a Security Clearance, I had to know and understand how security classifications worked*, and they are arcane rules. Understanding how cumbersome they are is essential to understanding what could have gone wrong in the alleged email scandal.
There are generally four levels of information in the classification system: Unclassified, Classified, Secret, Top Secret. There are other levels which involve encryption, but those are outside of our discussion. What makes some information fall into different categories is purely subjective and someone creating the document makes a decision, and it might go to review and someone else (with more authority) might make a different determination. The severity of classification almost always goes upward, and this is important point to keep in mind.
So, if you think of a document, you might think that it is composed of pages which are composed of paragraphs and those paragraphs are composed of sentences and those sentences are composed of words, you might see something like boxes within boxes.
Did anyone in the course of the investigation clearly state that the classified information that they found was actually important and useful to potential hackers? There is a big difference between the sort of thing that this article describes (or even names of classified operations without descriptions) and details about secret projects, agents, etc. Unfortunately, the rest of us don’t get to see to judge for ourselves.
The content of the emails were not addressed in the Comey’s statement or his testimony before the House committee. Since there was some classification, of course that must mean that Clinton was forwarding troop movements, CIA operative locations and nuclear security passcodes. That’s the only reasonable thing to assume.
Grab your pitchforks.