2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Hillary's classified email [View all]apnu
(8,790 posts)However its impossible to presume Hillary knows in her head what is classified or not, since there are millions of things that might be classified, and classification can be done retroactively. So what she knows to be unclassified on Tuesday maybe classified on thursday w/out her knowledge.
At best, she is supposed to think, "Could this be classified? I should check with someone in the DOD and find out."
We have no idea if she did that, do we? We could maybe get a clue if we look at the time difference between Hillary receiving and reading the email (if we have time stamps on when the email was read, probably not) and the time when she forwarded it. If those two things are close, then she probably didn't check if the intel Blumenthal gave her was classified or not. If its not close, then she might very well have checked with someone on that intel and gotten an answer she believed to make it unclassified at the time.