The latest FBI document release on Monday contains interviews with officials revealing that in spring 2015 Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy contacted an FBI official to coax the FBI to downgrade from classified to unclassified a Benghazi-related email that had sat on Mrs. Clinton’s server. At the time Mrs. Clinton was still insisting she’d never transmitted classified information. The headlines have focused on whether the Kennedy request to FBI official Brian McCauley was a quid pro quo: an offer that State would allow the FBI to place more agents in foreign countries, in exchange for downgrading the document. There is a dispute in the FBI interview notes over whether this was proposed by Mr. Kennedy or by Mr. McCauley, and both State and FBI deny an explicit tit for tat, as do Mr. Kennedy and Mr. McCauley. The FBI also did not downgrade the document. Yet even the FBI concedes it referred the “allegations” to “appropriate officials for review,” which makes the episode ripe for Congressional investigation. Even without a quid quo pro, the episode shows that the State Department has been assisting the Clinton campaign. Especially notable is evidence that Mr. Kennedy knew the FBI had grounds for classifying the document. According to the McCauley interview notes, Mr. Kennedy called asking for the downgrade, explaining that the email “caused problems” for him. Mr. Kennedy proposed that rather than mark the email classified, he’d give it a special exemption from Freedom of Information Act requests, which would allow him “to archive the document in the basement of [State] never to be seen again.” Mr. Kennedy seemed to agree that the email was too sensitive for public consumption but wanted to spare Mrs. Clinton the classified reality. Mr. Kennedy waged a sustained campaign to get Mrs. Clinton off the classification hook. One unnamed official claims Mr. Kennedy followed up his telephone request with a private meeting in which he again asked if the FBI would “see their way to marking the email unclassified.” He also, according to the notes, went directly to Michael Steinbach, the assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, to press his case. Meanwhile, an unnamed State Department employee who worked in the group tasked with handling FOIA requests and reviewing nearly 300 Benghazi-related emails, reported that senior State officials, including Mr. Kennedy, put the team under “immense pressure to complete the review quickly and to not label anything as classified.”
Two additional points that discredit the “it-was-all-routine” talking point favored by administration spinners and Clinton defenders. First, it’s notable that Kennedy called McCauley. McCauley, now retired, worked in the International Operations Division of the FBI. He did not work on classification issues. So why did Kennedy call him? McCauley and his colleagues in IOD had been trying to reach Kennedy for weeks in order to gain his approval for additional overseas slots for the FBI at US diplomatic facilities. Kennedy hadn’t called them back – until he launched his campaign to provide cover for Clinton. The second point: When Kennedy finally returned the calls from IOD, he began the conversation by asking for a “favor” from McCauley, whom he knew was seeking his approval for the additional slots. According to the FBI interviews, McCauley took Kennedy’s request to FBI’s records management division where it was rejected.
If the request had been “routine” and appropriate, Kennedy would have taken it to FBI’s records management division in the first place, since officials there make determinations on classification. That he didn’t, and instead called in a “favor” from someone who had a standing request into him, is revealing.
In any case, read the whole thing.
