Pete Hoekstra on Hillary Clinton’s “Culture of Recklessness”

“It’s a reckless management of classified information, and if they find any evidence that there was top secret information that was sent along through this system, but someone scrubbed the documents to take the classification, you know the actual words off the document, so it no longer said top secret. Two things to note here. Number one, just because you take the label off doesn’t mean it is no longer ‘top secret’. The second thing is that, that is a very serious crime, in terms of making those kinds of changes and adaptations to classified information. I think the point you are making is – it almost appears to be a culture of recklessness and you know just avoiding the law. We are always frustrated. Many of us in the intelligence community always believed that there’s too much ‘over- classified data’ – things that are classified that shouldn’t be, that is a frustration. There are ways to deal with that but the one thing you can’t do is say ‘I disagree with this classification so I’m just going to treat it as unclassified.'”

Former Congressman Pete Hoekstra served as the long time representative for the 2nd District of Michigan. From 2004 to 2007, he was also the Chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Today he serves as a Shillman Senior Fellow for the Investigative Project on Terrorism. Click here for the audio version.