The Hillary Clinton campaign has offered its weakest excuse yet for the fact that potentially hundreds of classified emails ended up on Clinton’s private email server.
Via Politico, the Clinton campaign argued Wednesday that the State Department has engaged in “overclassification.” The Clinton campaign cited a 1974 exchange between then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and then-CIA director William Colby regarding Turkey’s planned invasion of Cyprus. The exchange is currently redacted by the National Security Archive, but was published in unclassified form by the State Department a few years ago for some history book.
Well, that settles the whole thing, doesn’t it?
Nope. Though Kissinger annoyed Richard Nixon with his propensity to leak, it’s unlikely that foreign agents were able to steal Kissinger’s private strategy decades after he talked to Colby about it.
”The fact that someone in the intelligence community apparently sought to redact a 40-plus-year-old document, despite it being in the public sphere already in completely unredacted form, drives at exactly the point we are making about how entire agencies within the government can have competing views on what is sensitive and what is not,” said Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon, who used to be the spokesman for the Department of Justice. “This is a window into the phenomenon of overclassification that is currently bottling up the review of former Secretary Clinton’s emails.”
Unfortunately, that doesn’t explain Clinton’s swapping of classified emails on a private server. Even Clinton-friendly Politico had to admit that not all of Clinton’s emails were classified by the State Department in hindsight, as her campaign claimed. Politico reported that State classified them “in many cases retrospectively.” But not all cases.
As Breitbart News first reported, Clinton exchanged multiple emails on her private server that were “classified when originated.”