In a February 2010 email from her personal account to one of her State Department staffers, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the message’s contents were “certainly worthy of being top secret.”
The email was included in the collection of 7,000 messages involving Clinton’s private email address released Monday night by the State Department.
Her comment was apparently sarcastic. Other emails indicate the information in the February 2010 email was originally classified but was then unclassified at her request. She argued there was no reason for it to be secret in the first place.
Clinton has repeatedly said that she never used her personal email account to send or receive classified information and has said that any messages that involved classified information were cases where the information was classified after the fact. The argument has been contradicted by others in the intelligence community.
The initial February 2010 message originated from Jacob Sullivan, then the department’s director of policy planning, and involved a proposed statement by Clinton regarding former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair was working as a Middle East peace envoy on behalf of the U.S., the European Union, the United Nations and Russia — dubbed the “Quartet.” The proposed statement was meant to show U.S. support for Blair’s effort.
Sullivan emailed Clinton at 10:48 a.m. on Feb. 10, 2010, saying that he had received two proposed draft versions of the statement from Blair’s people. However, Sullivan could not send them to Clinton at the time.
“[F]or reasons that elude me, the two versions of the Blair statement were done on the classified system,” he told her. He said he would nevertheless get the statement to her “ASAP” in a readable format.
Clinton, responding from her private address “[email protected],” was exasperated. “It’s a public statement! Just email it.”
Sullivan replied that he shared her frustration. “But until ops converts it to the unclassified email system, there is no physical way for me to email it. I can’t even access it.”
About nine minutes later Sullivan sent the proposed drafts to Clinton. His message contained a two-paragraph draft statement by Blair on addressing then-Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s plan for a Palestinian state and a second version of the same statement edited by former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, then working as a special U.S. envoy with Blair.
In the message, Sullivan tells Clinton, “The first has Mitchell’s edits, the second is original from Blair’s guy to Mara.”
“Mara” was an apparent misspelling of the first name of Maura Pally, a former top Clinton State Department aide who now works at the Clinton Foundation as senior vice president of programs.
Clinton’s response, four minutes later, was, “Well, that is certainly worthy of being top secret. Fine to go w Mitchell version; Blair’s seems written as an oral statement.” This time, she used a different private address, “[email protected].”
Her official statement the following day was almost verbatim what Mitchell suggested.
• This story was originally published at 1:16 p.m. It has been updated to reflect additional information found in the State Department email release.
