Jim, If information discussed in any government meeting is classified, people in attendance must have a clearance level that is at least as high as the highest classified topic. If HRC did not have a security clearance, she should not have been permitted to be in meetings or read documents the topics of which were classified.

Now, it can get dicey when the president is involved (and it should be especially interesting to watch Democrats wrestle with this given their allegations against President Bush for alleged illegal behavior). A related issue came up two years ago when Democrats and the media were erroneously alleging that Scooter Libby had leaked classified information from a National Intelligence Estimate to the press. As I explained at the time, the information was not classified because President Bush himself had decided to declassify it so Libby could speak to the press about it. Ultimately, classified information belongs to the executive branch, and the President, as the constitutional embodiment of the executive, can declassify it and speak about it to anyone he wants.

There are, of course, statutes and regulations dictating how information gets classified, safeguarded, and declassified. I don’t believe the president is subject to them (although, since we don’t generally provoke constitutional crises just to make a point, it is the custom for presidents to comply with them). If the president is the ultimate constitutional arbiter of what is classified, I don’t think Congress can dictate to him how to perform that executive function. (This is part of why it’s so important to have a president of good character and judgment — if the president is cavalier with the nation’s secrets, there’s not a lot we can do about that.) Democrats, however, have taken a different position when there seemed to be an opportunity to argue that Bush was not “above the law”: to wit, Bush acted lawlessly unless he complied with the letter of every regulation.

I don’t believe there would have been any bar against President Clinton’s giving his wife a security clearance or declassifying information so he could speak to her about it. But if such things happened, there should be records. If there aren’t, that would be highly irregular. (I am talking here, of course, only about a situation in which a president has sought to involve his wife in a formal or quasi-formal policy-making role, which is what Sen. Clinton often suggests she had. Whether it’s legal or not, I assume many presidents have spoken in marital privacy with their wives about all sorts of classified matters, and there’d be nothing irregular about the lack of a paper trail for that.)

If Mrs. Clinton didn’t have a security clearance, it would have been improper for anyone in the executive branch other than President Clinton to discuss classified information with her or display it to her – in the absence, at the very least, of instructions from the president that the information at issue had been declassified.