Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used her private email system to send and receive dozens of emails containing information from foreign governments that was automatically deemed classified by U.S government and State Department regulations when generated, according to a new Reuters report. Reuters examined a small fraction of Clinton's emails that have been publicly released and found that at least 30 threads, representing dozens of individual emails dating back to 2009, include classification markings indicating the information is what the State Department considers "foreign government information," meaning it was "born classified."
Any written or spoken information provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts is automatically labeled as such, Reuters said.
"Clinton and her senior staff routinely sent foreign government information among themselves on unsecured networks several times a month, if the State Department's markings are correct," the report reads. "Within the 30 email threads reviewed by Reuters, Clinton herself sent at least 17 emails that contained this sort of information. In at least one case it was to a friend, Sidney Blumenthal, not in government."
Unredacted parts of the emails show the information includes comments shared privately by several foreign ministers, a prime minister and a foreign spy chief.
The report further calls into question claims Clinton has repeatedly made over the past few months that she didn't send or receive classified information on her unsecured private email account, which is prohibited by various government rules.
The inspector general for the Intelligence Community already identified two emails that passed through Clinton's server that contained information classified as "top secret" at the time it was sent, and investigators have flagged hundreds more for possibly containing classified information.
After the inspector general's revelation, Clinton began walking back her claim that she never sent or receive classified information, instead saying that she did not handle information that was marked classified at the time it was sent. And while Reuters notes that its findings don't invalidate Clinton's most recent claims that she didn't send or receive information marked classified, the media outlet points out that the government's standard nondisclosure agreement forms specifically warn employees that not all information is marked classified when exchanged.
Clinton also should have been aware of the series of presidential executive orders which have emphasized that information that foreign governments share with U.S. officials on the condition of confidentiality is the only kind of information that should "presumed" to be classified, reports the Daily Caller.
"It's born classified," J. William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. government's Information Security Oversight Office, told Reuters. Leonard was director of the White House's National Archives and Records of Administration from 2002 until 2008.
"If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by U.S. rules that is classified at the moment it's in U.S. channels and U.S. possession," he said in a telephone interview. For the State Department to say otherwise was "blowing smoke," he added.
Reuters said the State Department disputed its report. "We do not have the ability to go back and recreate all of the various factors that would have gone into the determinations," State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach told Reuters, after initially accusing the the outlet of making "outlandish accusations" in its report.
