State Department officials opted to classify every word of a memo sent to Hillary Clinton by a former campaign aide who was not employed by the government.
The email, which was authored in June 2012 by longtime Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal, apparently discussed the Eurozone crisis. But the entire message was redacted before its release Friday evening by the State Department and classified as “confidential,” the lowest level of classification.
The memo itself was also marked “CONFIDENTIAL” by Blumenthal.
The release of the classified email Friday raises questions about a key tenet of the Clinton campaign’s defense regarding the former secretary of state’s handling of classified material.
Clinton’s campaign claimed, in response to the announcement that 37 pages of emails had been deemed “top secret” and withheld, that classified emails had “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.”
However, the classified email from Blumenthal originated outside the government system altogether, as Blumenthal was not even a government employee when he sent the sensitive memo to Clinton.
It is unclear how Blumenthal obtained intelligence worthy of being classified nearly four years after being put into a memo.
