As I pointed out in the Paul Ryan snit letter thread… a choice little crack in the Comey bullshitter wall of bullshit press conference appeared thanks to the State Department yesterday (as noted over at the Great Orange Satan, no not Trump)… yesterday afternoon State Department spokesman John Kirby said that the only two e-mails that had a classified marking on them prior to being sent (doesn’t say if it is to or from Clinton) were “call sheets” that were only classified as some sort of internal process:
The State Department says human error was responsible for a pair of Hillary Clinton emails the FBI identified as marked classified when they were sent.
Describing a somewhat opaque internal process, spokesman John Kirby says officials often mark “call sheets” at the confidential level when the secretary of state is considering whom he or she will call. Once the secretary decides to make the call, the call sheets would be no longer classified.
Kirby says the markings on the Clinton emails mentioned by FBI Director James Comey “were no longer necessary or appropriate” as Clinton already had decided to make the calls.
One of the key elements to this story (that she knowingly sent marked classified materials) painting Clinton in a harsh light has been destroyed. So what Kirby said what the State Dept knows is there were 2 emails with Hillary’s own telephone call schedules in them. The call schedules are marked confidential until Hillary decides to make the phone calls, and then they aren’t confidential anymore, but some staffer forgot to remove the confidential marking.
As the New York Times noted…
(the two emails that Comey was spinning on about) were from one of Mrs. Clinton’s close aides, Monica R. Hanley, sent to prepare her for telephone calls with foreign leaders, according to a State Department official familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified information.
One email, dated Aug. 2, 2012, noted that Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations, was stepping down as special envoy trying to mediate the war in Syria. A second one, sent in April 2012, discussed Mrs. Clinton’s call to the newly inaugurated president of Malawi.
Each was marked with a small notation, “(C),” indicating it contained information classified as “confidential.”
These are are call sheets that once the Secretary made the calls, were no longer classified “confidential” but a staffer forgot to remove the small (c) markings after the Secretary had already made the calls in question.
This is like having a press release that says embargoed for public release until January 1, 2012 being emailed to someone on February 1, 2012 and forgetting to take off the “embargoed until January 1, 2012” stamp then screaming that “Clinton received emails that were embarked for public release” on a private email account on her private email server that in theory someone form the public could potentially been able to hack and read that already email which was no-longer embargoed when it was sent.