The GOP narrative around Hillary Clinton's State
Department emails got an assist from a seemingly unlikely source on Friday: the
so-called “Mainstream Media,” in the persons of Washington Post reporters Rosalind Helderman and Tom Hamburger,
and Chris Cillizza, who writes WaPo politics
blog, "The Fix.”
Cillizza’s take on the story is, as of this writing, in the WaPo Top 5 most widely read pieces:
Unfortunately, they all read far too much into far too little.
Sayeth
Cillizza:
For months, Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign have
stuck to a consistent story line when faced with of classified information on
the private server she used exclusively as secretary of state: She was the
victim of an overzealous intelligence community bent on categorizing
information as top secret or classified when it was, in fact, neither.
That defense hit a major snag on Friday when the State Department announced that it, too, had found
“top secret” information on Clinton’s server — 22 emails across seven separate
emails chains. The information, the State Department said, was so secret that
those emails would never be released to the public.
Suddenly Clinton’s narrative of an overly aggressive
intelligence community or a broader squabble between the intelligence world and
the State Department didn’t hold water. Or at least held a whole lot less water
than it did prior to Friday afternoon.
Only problem? The State Department said no such thing. Having heard part of the
State Department’s briefing on [conservative] talk radio on Friday, I recalled
it very differently. So I looked it up. Here’s what State
Department Spokesman John Kirby actually said:
I can confirm that as part of this monthly FOIA
production of former Secretary Clinton’s emails, the State Department will be
denying in full seven email chains found in 22 documents, representing 37
pages. The documents are being upgraded
at the request of the Intelligence Community because they contain a category of
top secret information. These documents were not marked classified at the
time that they were sent. We have worked closely with our interagency partners
on this matter, and this dialogue with the interagency is exactly how the
process is supposed to work. As to whether they were classified at the time
they were sent, the State Department, in the FOIA process, is focusing on
whether they need to be classified today. Questions about classification at the
time they were sent are being and will be handled separately by the State
Department. [emphasis added]
Kirby explicitly stated that
the classification upgrade was per request from the Intelligence Community, not
“the State Department itself.” This is
completely consistent with what Secretary Clinton and her campaign have been
saying all along. A few moments later, Kirby
further stated:
These emails denied in full
are among the emails discussed recently by the Intelligence Community inspector
general in a letter to Congress. We will not,
however, be confirming or speaking, as I said, to every detail provided in the
documents or in the ICIG’s letter. One
of these emails was also among those identified by the ICIG last summer as
possibly containing top secret information. [emphasis
added]
To be fair to Cillizza, his analysis
apparently relied on reporting by two of his Washington Post colleagues, who asserted:
The
Friday announcement was significant because it appeared to undercut Clinton’s
argument in recent months that she was merely the victim of a bureaucratic
squabble between overly strict analysts at the intelligence agencies and more
reasonable reviewers at the State Department.
The intelligence community’s inspector general
had previously indicated that he thought that some of the emails contained top
secret material. Until Friday, however, the State Department had declined to
concur with that assessment.
But
this isn’t an accurate reading of Kirby’s comments. In his initial statement and in response to
numerous reporters’ questions on Friday, Kirby
repeatedly reiterated that State had agreed to upgrade the emails in question
at the request of the Intelligence Community. The only slight deviation from this response
came when a reporter asked whether, “you guys [at
State] were prepared to release [these emails] until the intel community came
in and said hey, wait a second, you can’t do that?” To that question, Kirby replied:
No, I
wouldn’t say – I wouldn’t say that, Matt. As I said we had an ongoing
discussion about this traffic with them. At their request we’ve decided to make
this upgrade. It is a State Department decision. We’re doing it, but we’re
doing it at the request of the Intelligence Community. And we’re going to
continue to coordinate and consult with them going forward.
It does seem technically accurate to say that
decisions about whether to release documents in State’s possession pursuant to
a FOIA request is inherently a State Department decision. But folks infinitely more expert on this topic
than I have generally supported Clinton’s contention that some agencies have a
tendency to be overly cautious in making security classification determinations. And predictably,
the overly cautious entity usually wins the day, unless or until the decision
is overruled in an intra-agency MDR review or on appeal to the Interagency
Security Classification Appeals Panel.
The most recent Informational Security Oversight Office report
(at pdf p. 16) indicates that 62% of pages of classified materials challenged by
the public via the MDR process were wholly declassified at the initial review
stage, while an additional 32% of the pages were at least partially
declassified on review. That’s right: 94% of classified pages reviewed under MDR were
wholly or partially declassified in response. Of the much smaller universe of cases that
made it to review
on appeal to ISCAP (at pdf p. 26), 75%
of the 451 documents reviewed by ISCAP were ordered declassified, either wholly
or in part. These data points would
tend to support the contention that some
agencies, at least, have a substantial habit of overclassifying materials.
The National Security Archive, a non-profit based at George
Washington University, provided this
overview of the over-classification phenomenon just a few days ago:
National
Security Archive director Tom Blanton’s July 2015
Washington Post op-ed further lays out the ongoing problem
of overclassification. Blanton argues
that “the real secrets make up only a fraction of the classified universe, and
no secret deserves immortality. In fact, essential to the whole idea of
democratic government is that secret deals with dictators will come out
eventually, not least to deter the worst deals from being made…I showed
Congress the estimates over the years of how much gets classified that doesn’t
deserve to be. Ronald Reagan’s executive secretary for the National Security Council,
Rodney B. McDaniel, said 90 percent.
Thomas H. Kean, the Republican head
of the 9/11 Commission, said 75 percent of what he saw that
was classified should not have been.”
Blanton is far from alone in pointing out persistent
overclassification. The latest
Information Security Oversight Office report showed that
the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) continues to
overrule agency classification decisions in Mandatory Declassification Review
appeals nearly 75% of the time.
Of lesser import – but still
worth noting – is Cillizza’s contention
that Clinton’s campaign “pivoted”
on the email issue, supposedly in response to the comments from State:
The Clinton team
quickly pivoted. “After a process that has been dominated
by bureaucratic infighting that has too often played out in public view, the
loudest and leakiest participants in this interagency dispute have now
prevailed in blocking any release of these emails,” said campaign spokesman
Brian Fallon.
Calling
for the release of the allegedly top secret emails is a smart gambit by the
Clinton folks since it makes them
look as if they have nothing to hide while being protected by the
near-certainty that the State Department won’t simply change its mind on the
release because the Clinton team asked them to.
This wasn’t any kind of “pivot.” Secretary Clinton has been saying for almost a
full year that she wants the emails released (presumably to the extent that release would not jeopardize national security):
State Department spokesman John Kirby repeatedly reiterated on Friday that State
had upgraded classification of the 22 emails “at the Intelligence Community’s
request.” That sounds like simple interagency
comity. It’s too much of a stretch from
there to declaring that the State Department made some kind of important, revelatory,
independent determination regarding the proper classification.
