State Department spokesman John Kirby on Thursday defended a State Department practice of marking sections of emails for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with a “(C)” for classified though he couldn’t say whether it followed federal rules regarding designations for classified material.
“The degree to which it’s governed by regulation or [executive] order, I don’t know,” Kirby told reporters during his daily press briefing Thursday. “I’m happy to look [into it]. But I think we need to take 10 steps back and take a deep breath and look at this in perspective.”
The use of the “(C)” marking to designate classified material, he said, is a practice “many people use here to protect what we believe is sensitive information and to try to preserve decision space for the secretary of state,” he said.
Kirby on Wednesday said the “(C)” markings weren’t even necessary to protect the information in the emails — that they were instead the result of “human error.”
“They didn’t need to be there,” he said.
The issue of the “(C)” marking is a key element of FBI Director James Comey’s decision not to indict Clinton over her use of a private email server though he said he found her to be “extremely careless” in using the unsecured email to send and receive classified material.
Earlier Thursday Comey said Clinton may not have been “sophisticated enough” to understand the classified markings on emails she sent and received, so therefore, didn’t realize she was breaking the law in sending the information over her private personal email server.
Comey pointed to three emails Clinton sent or received that contained a “(C)” marking. After interviewing Clinton, he said he wasn’t sure “whether she was actually sophisticated enough to understand what a C in a parentheses means.”
Comey also indicated that the “(C)” marking isn’t the proper way to designate classified material, according to federal government rules on classification designations. Instead, they should have been marked with a header saying they are classified, and none of the three emails with the “(C)” markings contained that header information.
The Clinton campaign Thursday called Comey’s statement that the emails weren’t marked classified correctly a “key development.”
