Comment by jarpadat
8 months ago
I suppose a different claim strikes me as false. "should have been deemed classified at the time they were sent" is one thing, "there was, in fact, confidential stuff in there" is a different thing.
I think a decent case can be made that one rounds up to the other, but I guess that case seems more like an argument to be made than a fact to be corrected.
Just because something isn't labeled classified doesn't make it not classified. If you work anywhere with classified information, you are expected to know certain information is classified, or may become classified later. You may not always know the latter, but you should know the former.
I'm not going to defend classifying embarrassing information because it's well -- embarrassing. But the established trend is to classify information "just to be safe" and let someone else make the declassifying decisions, particularly someone that's not you.
There was a weird issue with Wikileaks in that publicly released information was still considered classified, and any documents must be still treated as such.
Was that silly, yes. This led to a weird issue where journalists and members of the public had more access to certain classified documents than people holding clearances.