Hillary Clinton Definitely Going To Email Jail This Time For Sure

See? Running scared, all right.

[contextly_sidebar id="NxCYkWHAWReVCNUZDIonyrOZq67WXD1v"]Better call the House Select Committee on Benghazi back into session, because with just days to go before the Iowa caucuses, there's finally some huge shocking news about Hillary Clinton and all the Top Secret emails on her private server, which as everyone knows is the one issue that Americans simply can't seem to stop talking about, at least after they've exhausted talking about the weather, sportsball, television, movies, their children, cat videos they saw on YouTube, and whether this milk is giving their coffee that funny taste. The carton says it's not expired yet, but it might be a little off. Here, smell it, what do you think? And then right after that, Hillary's emails.

What happened was that before releasing January's monthly stash of emails Friday, the State Department announced that it was withholding 22 of the emails because they contained information that has been reclassified as "Top Secret," although State Department spokesman John Kirby pointed out that "these documents were not marked classified at the time they were sent.” It's also not clear whether the newly reclassified emails were sent by Clinton, or had been sent to her by other State Department staff; the New York Times notes that the bulk of emails released from Clinton's server so far "were messages written by other State Department officials and forwarded by her closest aides."

Still, they were on her private server, and they're now marked classified, so the only logical conclusion is that Hillary Clinton is a spy. Be careful, her bowtie is really a camera.

So what's so secret about these emails? Can't tell you, it's a secret. The AP reports a total of about 37 pages from "seven email chains" would be withheld because they were so secret, which would presumably include pages where the only new message is "Thought you should see this" or "Trey Gowdy's hair is the real crime against humanity, lol." According to "a key intelligence official," the emails, unclassified when sent but now magically so sensitive that not even redacted versions could be released,

concerned "special access programs" -- highly restricted, classified material that could point to confidential sources or clandestine programs like drone strikes.

"The documents are being upgraded at the request of the intelligence community because they contain a category of top secret information," State Department spokesman John Kirby told the AP, calling the withholding of documents in full "not unusual."

The Clinton campaign says that the real issue here isn't that Hillary Clinton was casually slinging secrets around on an unsecured server, but an obsession with classification and secrets in the intelligence community that Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said "appears to be over-classification run amok." The campaign is calling for all the emails to be released since in at least some cases the "classified" information is already public.

“We understand that these emails were likely originated on the State Department’s unclassified system before they were ever shared with Secretary Clinton, and they have remained on the department’s unclassified system for years,” Mr. Fallon said.

Clinton herself said in a recent NPR interview that at lease one of the newly "top secret" documents included a New York Times article about the Obama administration's drone program:

How a New York Times public article that goes around the world could be in any way viewed as classified, or the fact that it would be sent to other people off of the New York Times site, I think, is one of the difficulties that people have in understanding what this is about.

Republicans are of course certain that this is the email scandal that will finally sink Clinton's campaign for good, if not send her to jail for the rest of her life. Donald Trump tweeted (from an unsecure server):

Marco Rubio repeated his insistence that the email server issue "disqualified" Clinton from the presidency:

“If someone on my staff did what she did, you know what would happen?” he said. “They would be fired, and they would be prosecuted.”

And then he'd find them a nice job at the Heritage Foundation. And actual convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza presents this really bad photoshop to prove that nothing ever changes:

The man doesn't really do irony, does he? (The real headlines for the Daily News today are, of course, about sportsball)

[contextly_sidebar id="op4A89El7WmTg5pYH8TKbk9eezHtXuZl"]So anyway, Hillz, it was nice knowing you, bummer about how this HUGE SCANDAL will finally murder your campaign just like you personally strangled Vince Foster while not declaring your tax losses on Whitewater and planning the attack on Benghazi. Maybe if you're lucky, you really will get another 11 hours of grilling from House Republicans, seeing as how that made you look great last time.

Oh, and congratulations on picking up the big New York Times endorsement! Maybe they feel bad about all the times they screwed up the email story over the summer?

[ NYT / AP / Atlantic / WaPo / NYT endorsement]