It's the most important part of the argument. Otherwise the entire thing is waved away as "The State Department disagrees that this material should be classified." And that would be that. The only response is the original classifying authority argument. Which, again, is the political equivalent of grammar trolling.
A) Arguments tend to be interconnected, a clockwork of points and flourishes, and you can't just handwave pieces away and proceed on the notion that an argument would be weaker if it weren't there. You dismiss it as "an obscure executive order", but Hillary was perhaps the third or fourth most powerful person in the country, and it certainly should not have been obscure to her and her staff! It's a direct statement, signed by her boss, of the rules regarding information classification and declassification, and it stated, point blank, that departments have no authority to undo the classifications instituted by other departments.
B) You also have not addressed his point that a number of prominent individuals in the intelligence committee have stated that, yes, her server did contain classified material, and that independent analysis of the emails indicates the presence of material that SHOULD have been marked as classified even at the time it was transmitted
according to the department's own rules (i.e. information given in confidence by foreign sources), and that whether it was classified at the time it was transmitted is not necessarily material, given it is understood custom at that echelon of government that some material that will cross your desk IS classified, even if it's not designated as such, and that caution and discretion in handling it is therefore required.
C) This is only "pedantic" in the way that a grammar argument is if you don't think it matters whether or not a presidential candidate's discretion and fidelity to specified, transparent, and traceable codes of conduct in dealing with the country's secrets is material. This election is a special case, given the true horror of the alternative, but in a normal election, it might certainly be A factor that it would be reasonable for the average uncommitted/independent voter to take into account, because it DOES speak poorly of Clinton's judgment, at a bare minimum, even if you think there are other actions or positions she's taken in the past to counterbalance that.
And my use of the word
wrong was quadruple - yes, wrong in the sense that I think it is morally wrong not to be careful with classified information you have been entrusted with, wrong in the sense that I think it was a BAD idea to have information on an unsecured private server, because we DO live in an age of hackers and of combat in the information sphere, wrong in the sense that one of the reasons to HAVE information on government servers is to keep "leaky" information dissemination in check, and wrong in the sense that doing something so unnecessary that people WILL care about when you are the only thing standing between Americans and yet another failed Republican presidency was just fucking
dumb!
