Daily Archives: 1 September 2015

Clinton’s Emails

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State released 7,000 more of Hilary Clinton’s emails, those…documents…transmitted via her private, unprotected email server. One hundred fifty of them contained classified information.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the emails in question were “subsequently upgraded” to classified. He stressed that none of the emails was considered classified at the time.

This is so utterly disingenuous as to be outright lies. The material in the emails were not “subsequently upgraded” to classified; they were only marked classified after the fact. The material was classified all along.

[S]ome of the information on Clinton’s server was inherently classified. Fox’s analysts cited a memo transmitting information provided by foreign diplomats about Sudan peace talks.

As Shannen Coffin explained, because such information is substantive and comes from foreign diplomats, it is “born classified.”

Information from other sources also is born classified. Recall the first set of emails discovered to be classified (if unmarked as such): they passed along information derived from Talent Keyhole programs.

There are two things about this. All the folks sending, receiving, and reading those emails—TO, FROM, CC, and BCC senders and receivers (and relayers—that’s one reason why the email headers (available only in the electronic copies) are so important), every single one of them—knew or should have known that the material was classified, regardless of their markings. All the folks sending, receiving, or reading those emails should have squawked to the classification authorities of the sender’s office and of State, and to the Security facilities of both offices, about the security violations those emails represented, both by their lack of markings and by their existence on an unclassified, unprotected server.

The other thing is that the mere transmission of such information via unsecured means, or the mere retention of them, however briefly, on unsecured media, is a felony, whether or not the information was properly marked. Everyone in that sequence of transmittal—TO, FROM, CC, and BCC senders and receivers and relayers—who did not so report committed a felony.

Every single one.

PRC Local Debt

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The Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress imposed a 600 billion yuan limit on the direct debt local governments are allowed to run up this year, the official Xinhua News Agency said late Saturday. That would be on top of 15.4 trillion yuan on debt owed by local governments as of the end of 2014, Xinhua said.

That works out to about $2.5 trillion in total local debt across the country. There’s no word on how the NPC, or any other part of the central government, intends to enforce that limit. No more fudging the economic data by the locals, perhaps? That’s where it would have to begin. But then what? Fire the local government employees—or better, enroll them in one of Xi’s reeducation programs? Terminate local services? Raise taxes? Some more?

But there are loopholes.

The caps don’t include indirect liabilities, which officials said totaled 8.6 trillion yuan (roughly $1.3 trillion), according to Xinhua.

In addition, the central government has expanded a local-debt refinancing program that allows local governments to swap their high-interest debt for low interest central government debt. Don’t ask who sets the central government’s bond rates. Do think, though, about the financial liability being laid off onto Chinese “taxpayers” across the country from those locals.

And

Separately, lawmakers will remove a 75% cap on banks’ loan-to-deposit ratios on Oct 1, Xinhua said on Saturday.

Boy, howdy, are there loopholes.