In her latest attempt to address questions about the presence of classified information on her private, unsecured email system, Hillary Clinton is attempting to cast doubt on the methods the entire U.S. government uses to handle its secrets.
Whether the material in her emails that has been flagged as classified is in fact classified is open to debate, Clinton told reporters in Las Vegas Tuesday. “That is not in any way agreed upon,” she said. “The State Department disagrees. That happens all the time in these efforts to say what can go out and what can’t go out. That is a part of the ordinary process.”
Moreover, Clinton said, investigations like the one currently taking place with her emails are nothing new. “Everybody is acting like this is the first time it’s ever happened,” she said. “It happens all the time. And I can only tell you that the State Department has said over and over again, we disagree [that the material is classified]. So, that’s what they’re sorting out and that’s what happens a lot of the times.”
“What you’re seeing now is a disagreement between agencies saying, you know what? They should have, and the other saying no, they shouldn’t,” Clinton concluded. “That has nothing to do with me.”
Clinton’s intent, apparently, is to muddy the waters so that it is not clear to anyone whether there even was any classified information on her secret email server. And if there was no classified information in the first place, then what is all the fuss about?
Some of Clinton’s supporters in the world of political commentary are taking up the argument, suggesting she has been innocently caught up in a longstanding governmental debate about classification. In a piece headlined “Hillary’s Problem: The Government Classifies Everything,” Jeffrey Toobin, of the New Yorker and CNN, argues that Clinton is the victim of government over-classification.
“In one case, according to media reports,” writes Toobin, “one of Clinton’s potentially classified email exchanges is nothing more than a discussion of a newspaper story about drones. That such a discussion could be classified underlines the absurdity of the current system.”
Some of the people actually dealing with Clinton’s emails disagree. Last week, when Clinton’s aides argued that the material in her emails might not be classified at all, Jamal Ware, spokesman for the House Benghazi Committee, released a statement noting that independent authorities have found material in Clinton’s emails that was top secret, “compartmented” information — meaning it was not only classified, but classified at a very high level.
“The Intelligence Community Inspector General, nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate when it was controlled by Democrats, determined emails on Secretary Clinton’s server contained Top Secret, compartmented intelligence information — not the Benghazi Committee,” Ware said. “That determination was confirmed by the proper interagency process and classification authorities, and its implications are being investigated by the FBI.”
Is it likely that the intelligence community would find that Document A was classified at or near the highest level of secrecy, and that the State Department would find that it is not classified at all? That is what Clinton would have the public believe. And by the way, insiders point out, it is the originating agency that determines a document’s classification level, so it might not be the State Department’s call to make anyway.
Finally, Clinton’s aides have been quick to blame her problems not on anything she did herself but on the “partisan” investigation being conducted by the Benghazi Committee. While the committee did discover Clinton’s secret email server, her current difficulties are coming not from the committee but from the inspector general of the intelligence community and, most importantly, the FBI. That’s where the real action in the email investigation is today.
