State Department official 'pressured' FBI
to declassify Clinton email: FBI documents
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[October 18, 2016]
By Jonathan Allen
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A senior State
Department official sought to shield Hillary Clinton last year by
pressuring the FBI to drop its insistence that an email on the private
server she used while secretary of state contained classified
information, according to records of interviews with FBI officials
released on Monday.
The accusation against Patrick Kennedy, the State Department's most
senior manager, appears in the latest release of interview summaries
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's year-long investigation into
Clinton's sending and receiving classified government secrets via her
unauthorized server.
Although the FBI decided against declassifying the email's contents, the
claim of interference added fuel to Republicans' belief that officials
in President Barack Obama's administration have sought to protect
Clinton, a Democrat, from criminal liability as she seeks to succeed
Obama in the Nov. 8 election. The FBI recommended against bringing any
charges in July and has defended the integrity of its investigation.
Clinton has said her decision to use a private server in her home for
her work as the U.S. secretary of state from 2009 to 2013 was a mistake
and has apologized.
One FBI official, whose name is redacted, told investigators that
Kennedy repeatedly "pressured" the various officials at the FBI to
declassify information in one of Clinton's emails. The email was about
the deadly 2012 attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, and
included information that originated from the FBI, which meant that the
FBI had final say on whether it would remain classified.
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A State Department spokesman, Mark Toner, said Kennedy was not
pressuring the FBI but was just trying to understand better how the
FBI's classification process worked.
The dispute began in the summer of 2015 as officials were busy reviewing
the roughly 30,000 emails Clinton returned to the State Department ahead
of their court-ordered public release in batches in 2015 and 2016.
The official said the State Department's office of legal counsel called
him to question the FBI's ruling that the information was classified,
but the FBI stood by its decision.
Soon after that call, one of the official's FBI colleagues received a
call from Kennedy in which Kennedy "asked his assistance in altering the
email's classification in exchange for a 'quid pro quo.'"
The FBI official said he also joined at least two discussions in which
Kennedy "continued to pressure" the FBI about the email. The official
said Kennedy appeared to be trying to protect Clinton by minimizing the
appearance of classified information in emails from the server that
Clinton used while she was the country's most senior diplomat.
AGENCIES SAY NO 'QUID PRO QUO"
In a separate interview summary among the 100 pages released on Monday,
another unnamed FBI official confirmed a discussion of a "quid pro quo."
He said Kennedy told him in a phone call that the FBI's classification
of the email "caused problems" for Kennedy. The official said he told
Kennedy he would look into the email, which he had not yet seen, if the
State Department would consider allowing more FBI agents to be posted in
Iraq in exchange.
The State Department and the FBI both confirmed that a conversation
about the email's classification and an increase in FBI slots in Iraq
took place, but both agencies said there was no "quid pro quo."
After a year-long FBI investigation into the server, FBI Director James
Comey said in July he found that while laws governing classified
information may have been broken no reasonable prosecutor would bring
charges. He said, however, that Clinton and her staff had been
"extremely careless" in handling information that had been classified to
protect national security.
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Toner, the State Department spokesman, said there was "no quid pro quo,"
and told reporters that it was the FBI official who raised the
possibility with Kennedy of allowing more agents in Iraq during the
conversation about the email.
"After the conversation took place about the upgrading classification,
at the end of that, there was a kind of, 'Oh, by the way, hey, we're
looking at how we want more slots" in Iraq, Toner said, calling it a
"clear pivot" in the topic of conversation. "No increase in FBI Iraq
slots resulted from this conversation," he said.
The FBI also confirmed both topics were raised in the same conversation,
and that the FBI official who discussed the email and Iraq with Kennedy
had since retired. "Although there was never a quid pro quo, these
allegations were nonetheless referred to the appropriate officials for
review," the FBI said in its statement, which did not say what the
outcome of the review was.
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![](../images/101816pics/news_a45.jpg)
Democratic
presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaks at a fundraiser in
Seattle, Washington, U.S., October 14, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy
Nicholson
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TRUMP CALLS IT "COLLUSION"
Other officials have made similar complaints to investigators of
unusual pressure not to mark information as classified in Clinton's
emails last year. According to earlier documents the FBI released
last month, at least one official at the State Department told
investigators that there was pressure by senior department officials
to mislead the public about the presence of classified information
in Clinton's emails ahead of their public release.
A summary released on Monday showed at least two other State
Department officials making similar allegations.
One official who worked in the State Department's office that deals
with Freedom of Information Act requests told investigators they
felt "intimidated" by senior department officials if they suggested
that any of Clinton's emails on Benghazi contained classified
information, and named Kennedy as one of the officials who pressured
"employees to not label anything as classified."
The State Department has said these allegations are also false.
Ultimately, the FBI told Kennedy that declassification was not
possible, according to the interview summaries, and the State
Department posted it online last year marked as classified, with
heavy redactions.
Clinton's Republican rival for the White House, Donald Trump, posted
a video online on Monday in which he said the FBI documents showed
"corruption at the highest levels."
"This is collusion between the FBI, Department of Justice and the
State Department to try and make Hillary Clinton look like an
innocent person when she's guilty of very high crimes," Trump said.
Later on Monday, Trump proposed a series of ethics rules he said
would crack down on government corruption, including a five-year ban
on former administration officials lobbying after leaving government
and a lifetime ban on senior officials lobbying for foreign
governments.
He said former President Bill Clinton had a five-year lobbying ban
but lifted it at the end of his administration. Obama put his own
"revolving door" rules in place at the beginning of his time in
office.
Several Republican lawmakers called on Obama to investigate Kennedy
and remove him from the department. Toner of the State Department
said Kennedy "has the full confidence" of John Kerry, Clinton's
successor as secretary of state.
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Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee's chairman, said
in a statement that Obama, who is campaigning for Clinton to become
his successor as president, was trying to "shield" Clinton and that
she "cannot be trusted" with classified information.
Paul Ryan, the top elected Republican in the U.S. Congress, referred
to the FBI summaries on Twitter. "This bears all the signs of a
cover-up," he wrote.
In 2015, Clinton repeatedly said she never sent or received
classified information via her server, but since the release of the
FBI report in July she has said she relied on the judgment of her
subordinates at the department.
Robby Mook, her campaign manager, downplayed the account from the
FBI interview summary, telling reporters it was "not uncommon for
officials within a department to fight over classification."
(Additional reporting by Julia Edwards, Emily Stephenson, Arshad
Mohammed and Luciana Lopez; Writing by Jonathan Allen; Editing by
Frances Kerry and Leslie Adler)
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