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 While the department is now stamping a few dozen of the publicly
released emails as "Classified," it stresses this is not evidence of
rule-breaking. Those stamps are new, it says, and do not mean the
information was classified when Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner
in the 2016 presidential election, first sent or received it.
But the details included in those "Classified" stamps — which
include a string of dates, letters and numbers describing the nature
of the classification — appear to undermine this account, a Reuters
examination of the emails and the relevant regulations has found.
The new stamps indicate that some of Clinton's emails from her time
as the nation's most senior diplomat are filled with a type of
information the U.S. government and the department's own regulations
automatically deems classified from the get-go — regardless of
whether it is already marked that way or not.
In the small fraction of emails made public so far, Reuters has
found at least 30 email threads from 2009, representing scores of
individual emails, that include what the State Department's own
"Classified" stamps now identify as so-called 'foreign government
information.' The U.S. government defines this as any information,
written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their
foreign counterparts.
 This sort of information, which the department says Clinton both
sent and received in her emails, is the only kind that must be
"presumed" classified, in part to protect national security and the
integrity of diplomatic interactions, according to U.S. regulations
examined by Reuters.
"It's born classified," said J. William Leonard, a former director
of the U.S. government's Information Security Oversight Office
(ISOO). Leonard was director of ISOO, part of the White House's
National Archives and Records Administration, from 2002 until 2008,
and worked for both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush
administrations.
"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, adding that for the State Department to say otherwise was
"blowing smoke."
Reuters' findings may add to questions that Clinton has been facing
over her adherence to rules concerning sensitive government
information. Spokesmen for Clinton declined to answer questions, but
Clinton and her staff maintain she did not mishandle any
information.
"I did not send classified material, and I did not receive any
material that was marked or designated classified," Clinton told
reporters at a campaign event in Nevada on Tuesday.
Although it appears to be true for Clinton to say none of her emails
included classification markings, a point she and her staff have
emphasized, the government's standard nondisclosure agreement warns
people authorized to handle classified information that it may not
be marked that way and that it may come in oral form.
The State Department disputed Reuters' analysis but declined
requests to explain how it was incorrect.
 The findings of the Reuters review are separate from the recent
analysis by the inspector general for U.S. intelligence agencies,
who said last month that his office found four emails that contained
classified government secrets at the time they were sent in a sample
of 40 emails not yet made public.
The State Department has said it does not know whether the inspector
general is correct. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched
an investigation into the security of the copies of the emails
outside the government's control.
FOR THE SECRETARY'S EYES ONLY
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. 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.
The information appears to include privately shared comments by a
prime minister, several foreign ministers and a foreign spy chief,
unredacted bits of the emails show. Typically, Clinton and her staff
first learned the information in private meetings, telephone calls
or, less often, in email exchanges with the foreign officials.
In an email from November 2009, the principal private secretary to
David Miliband, then the British foreign secretary, indicates that
he is passing on information about Afghanistan from his boss in
confidence. He writes to Huma Abedin, Clinton's most senior aide,
that Miliband "very much wants the Secretary (only) to see this
note."
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Nearly five pages of entirely redacted information follow. Abedin
forwarded it on to Clinton's private email account.
State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach, in an initial response to
questions on how the department applies classification regulations,
said that Reuters was making "outlandish accusations." In a later
email, he said it was impossible for the department to know now
whether any of the information was classified when it was first
sent.
"We do not have the ability to go back and recreate all of the
various factors that would have gone into the determinations," he
wrote.
The Reuters review also found that the declassification dates the
department has been marking on these emails suggest the department
might believe the information was classified all along. Gerlach said
this was incorrect.
EXECUTIVE ORDERS
A series of presidential executive orders has governed how officials
should handle the ceaseless incoming stream of raw, usually unmarked
information they acquire in their work. Since at least 2003, they
have emphasized that information shared by a foreign government with
an expectation or agreement of confidentiality is the only kind that
is "presumed" classified.
The State Department's own regulations, as laid out in the Foreign
Affairs Manual, have been unequivocal since at least 1999: all
department employees "must ... safeguard foreign government and NATO
RESTRICTED information as U.S. Government Confidential" or higher,
according to the version in force in 2009, when these particular
emails were sent.
"Confidential" is the lowest U.S. classification level for
information that could harm national security if leaked, after "top
secret" and "secret".
State Department staff, including the secretary of state, receive
training on how to classify and handle sensitive information, the
department has said. In March, Clinton said she was "certainly well
aware" of classification requirements.
Reuters was unable to rule out the possibility that the State
Department was now overclassifying the information in the emails, or
applying the regulations in some other improper or unusual way.
John Fitzpatrick, the current ISOO director, said Reuters had
correctly identified all the governing rules but said it would be
inappropriate for his office to take a stance on Clinton's emails,
in part because he did not know the context in which the information
was given.
A spokeswoman for one of the foreign governments whose information
appears in Clinton's emails said, on condition of anonymity to
protect diplomatic relations, that the information was shared
confidentially in 2009 with Clinton and her senior staff.
If so, it appears this information should have been classified at
the time and not handled on a private unsecured email network,
according to government regulations.
The foreign government expects all private exchanges with U.S.
officials to be treated that way, the spokeswoman for the foreign
government said.
Leonard, the former ISOO director, said this sort of information was
improperly shared by officials through insecure channels more
frequently than the public may realize, although more typically
within the unsecured .gov email network than on private email
accounts.
With few exceptions, officials are forbidden from sending classified
information even via the .gov email network and must use a dedicated
secure network instead. The difference in Clinton's case, Leonard
said, is that so-called "spillages" of classified information within
the .gov network are easier to track and contain.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen, editing by Ross Colvin)
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