Secrecy experts and former government officials have expressed serious doubts that Hillary Clinton could have written thousands of emails as secretary of state without one of them containing classified information,
The New York Times reported.
The former first lady has released 55,000 documents to the State Department written on her private computer server while conducting official duties during her four-year tenure as the top U.S. diplomat in the Obama administration.
But at a
news conference this week to admit she had used a personal email account for government correspondence, she vowed: "I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. I'm certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material."
However, a former senior State Department official told the newspaper it was improbable that some classified information would not be included in the more than 30,000 work-related emails that Clinton's staff handed over to the State Department after the controversy became known.
"I would assume that more than 50 percent of what the secretary of state dealt with was classified," said the former official. "Was every single email of the secretary of state completely unclassified? Maybe, but it's hard to imagine."
Republicans are concerned that Clinton may have violated government record-keeping regulations by using her private email account to conduct official business, according to reports.
And now the Times says that keeping classified information in a personal email account on a private computer server, like the one at Clinton's New York home, would be a violation of secrecy laws.
Thomas Blanton, the director of the non-profit National Security Archive at George Washington University, was also skeptical that Clinton could have avoided writing classified material during her four years in charge of the State Department.
Blanton, whose organization has fought the government for decades to make official documents public, said sarcastically: "As a longtime critic of the government's massive overclassification, I thought it was a refreshing touch that (Clinton) conducted all her email in unclassified form."
Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, wondered that if, prior to the scandal, a reporter had requested all of Clinton's emails under the Freedom of Information Act, she would have declared some documents classified.
"It would have been a real surprise if none of it was withheld on the grounds of classification," Aftergood told the Times, while noting that Clinton had the authority to decide which documents are classified.
"There's zero chance that she'll be charged with unauthorized retention of classified information, because she decides what's classified," Aftergood said.
The newspaper said that for years Republican and Democratic lawmakers have claimed that the government often "overclassifies" information, putting the word "secret" on millions of documents that do not contain sensitive material. In 2013, some 80 million documents were classified.
The Times also pointed out that correspondence with foreign countries is routinely classified under secrecy laws, adding that "foreign government information" is an official category of classified data.
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