Newly-Released Clinton Email Was Marked Classified When It Hit Clinton’s Unclassified Server

When her use of an unclassified email server first broke in March 2015, Hillary Clinton’s earliest statements were that no classified information was sent or received.

She quickly changed her standard reply to say nothing sent or received was marked classified at the time. As recently as Wednesday of last week, she told reporters, “nothing that I sent or received was marked classified. And nothing has been demonstrated to contradict that. So it is the fact. It was the fact when I first said it. It is the fact that I’m saying it now.”

(The statement is itself an outright lie. Some information — the names of CIA undercover personnel, imminent drone strikes, details on U.S. NSA sources and methods, for example — is inherently classified and does not need to be marked to restate that. In addition, many suspected classified documents that were marked as such were simply retyped minus the marker when they were sent to Hillary. Leaving the marker off does not “declassify” information, and is in fact a national security crime.)

Marked Classified

However, even Clinton’s statement that nothing was marked classified has now been proven a lie.

One of her just-released emails carries a clear classification marking known as a portion marking. That marking was on the email when it was sent directly to Clinton’s account.” Nothing done retroactively, though retroactive classification is a standard tool used throughout the government and validly changes a document.

Portion marking is used when a document contains paragraphs of various levels of classification. Paragraph one may be marked as (U) for unclassified, paragraph two as (S) for secret and so forth.

The Clinton email in question has a paragraph marked (C), which means it is classified at the confidential level. The text refers to a phone call with Malawi’s first female president.

Everything after that (C) was fully redacted before it was publicly released by the State Department. One can only guess that someone sending Clinton the information via an unsecured device forgot to delete the (C), and then in the clearance process at State the (C) portion marker was overlooked. Accidents do happen. People make mistakes.

So, you want a smoking gun? You got it.

For Hillary Supporters:

It does not matter whether the classification was a high or low level one. You simply cannot include any classified information on an unclassified system. To do so is a violation of law. It does not matter if, in your opinion, whether or not he material should have been classified, or was over-classified. Clinton could have declassified it following standard procedures but did not do so (see, because you can retroactively classify something, you can also retroactively declassify something.)

But what is most significant here is that Clinton lied. Stone cold lied. There was marked classified on her unclassified server. And that does matter.

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent. Reprinted from the his blog with permission.