A batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails made public by the State Department Monday included 57 messages that contained information from foreign governments.
The 57 email threads were marked as classified by the agency because they held information that should have been treated as classified from the start, according to a Reuters report.
The Foreign Affairs Manual, which dictates the handling of such intelligence, calls foreign government information “the most important category of national security information” and requires agency officials to treat it as classified as soon as it’s written.
In one email cited by the report, Jake Sullivan, then Clinton’s director of policy planning, relayed the details of his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Clinton in an exchange that has since been classified.
Intelligence experts argue such details should have been regarded as classified at the time, regardless of whether the information is officially marked as classified.
The emails that have been made public contain roughly 188 messages that have since been classified.
State Department officials have refused to specify whether some of the emails should have been treated as classified when written, citing difficulties in going “back in time” to “judge accurately what the conditions were” that might have required the information to be classified then.
But whistleblowers involved in the process have claimed officials in the agency’s legal office tampered with classification markings on at least four Benghazi-related emails, according to a report by Fox News.
The revelation raises questions about the true extent of sensitive information contained in Clinton’s private emails.
After career State officials redacted four emails because they were classified, the agency’s legal office changed the markings on those emails to make it look like the text was being redacted under a routine exemption in the Freedom of Information Act.
Officials with knowledge of the situation wondered if the changes were the result of a conflict of interest involving Katherine Duval, the State Department attorney in charge of the agency’s document production.
Duval worked at the same law firm now representing Clinton before a stint at the IRS that put her at the center of the tax agency’s targeting scandal. She now oversees the State Department’s handling of the Clinton emails.
