This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz seems not to understand how someone can be careless with email. As I understand from news reports, of the roughly 30,000 emails that Hillary Clinton sent or received on her private email server, about 100 had classified material. The large majority of them were not marked classified, but were classified after she sent them. She was guilty of not being able to read the minds of the people who reclassify information. There were three emails that contained material that was not marked "classified" at the top of the material, but portions of the material inside the documents were marked classified.
OK, so for an average of one email in 10,000, Clinton forwarded material in an email without reading the entire block of forwarded material. People forward information all the time without reading all of it. The secretary of state should be more careful than the average person forwarding material, but missing the word "classified" buried in the middle of the material in only one email per 10,000 is pretty good in my opinion. As FBI Director James Comey stated, she was careless, not criminal.
Does Chaffetz read every word of every email that goes out under his name? I recall him doing a particularly poor job of vetting a grossly misleading graph in his attack on Planned Parenthood at a recent hearing. Carelessness happens.
Gene Mahalko
Salt Lake City