A State Department spokesperson on Tuesday rejected allegations that the department tried to offer the FBI an incentive to declassify one of Hillary Clinton’s private emails, and instead said that idea came from just one FBI official, and has been debunked by both agencies.
Notes from the FBI’s investigation said one witness said State offered the FBI a “quid pro quo” to declassify the email, after which the FBI suggested that it might be able to do that if State agreed to posting more FBI officials in Iraq. But the deal never happened, and State Department spokesman John Kirby downplayed it further on Tuesday by saying that idea was found in a “summary of an interview with one FBI employee who gave these views.”
“We looked into this and the FBI looked into this,” he said. “It is just not true.”
When asked on Fox if the FBI official got it wrong, Kirby said, “What I’m saying is the FBI as an institution said there was no bargain suggested.”
“There wasn’t even an inkling of that,” he added.
Kirby did acknowledge that Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy did work to convince the FBI that the some of Clinton’s emails did not warrant the classification levels.
“We did not think it deserved to be classified at the secret level,” he said. “The FBI obviously had a different view. We ended up losing that argument.”
