Hillary’s State Department Assist The email classification fight was not about routine procedures.
If the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server has shown anything, it’s that the Clintons have many helpers in Washington. This includes the State Department, where even the civil servants have tried to protect their former boss.
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.
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