Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is stepping up its response to complaints that she stored classified material on a home-brewed email server. The core of the current controversy, the campaign asserted Wednesday, stems not from Clinton’s handling of emails but the dysfunctional system used by agencies to designate and safeguard classified documents.

The new effort, which aides described as an educational campaign, came as a top Clinton strategist acknowledged that the Clinton team intends to respond more proactively to criticisms that Clinton put national security secrets at risk by relying on a private server.


POLITICO has reported that some Democratic operatives are increasingly worried about the impact of the email flap on Clinton’s quest for the Democratic nomination and believe her campaign has responded too passively.

“I think, if you’ve seen over the last couple of weeks, we have changed our strategy, in that we are trying to do more education through phone calls like this, through television appearances, through emails that we send directly to our supporters,” Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri said Wednesday during a 35-minute phone call with journalists. “We do think people have concerns and questions, and it’s really confusing and we want to answer them.”

During a testy exchange with reporters in Las Vegas on Tuesday, the former secretary of state portrayed herself as caught in crossfire between her former agency and intelligence agencies fighting over what should and shouldn’t be classified.

“What you’re seeing now is a disagreement between agencies saying, ‘You know what? They should have.’ And the other is saying, ‘No, they shouldn’t.’ That has nothing to do with me,” Clinton said.

Clinton also said the dispute was unrelated to her decision to use a private email server, since government rules also forbid sending classified information on unclassified government systems.

“If it had been a government account, and I said, ‘Release it,’ we’d be having the same arguments,” she said.

Clinton has turned over her server, along with thumb drive copies retained by her private attorney, to the Department of Justice for examination and safekeeping.

In the past 24 hours, Clinton’s aides and allies have increasingly trained their fire on seemingly-baffling aspects of government’s national security classification system. And on Wednesday, the Clinton camp got a new piece of ammunition for its argument: a heavily redacted transcript the State Department just released of a conversation former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had with CIA Director William Colby in 1974 about the imminent Turkish invasion of Cyprus.

In the transcript made public by the National Security Archive, the State Department deleted all substantive portions of the conversation, asserting that they were classified national security secrets and contained sensitive details about the CIA’s personnel and structure.

However, researchers at the nonprofit document archive thought the transcript looked familiar and soon realized why: Eight years ago, the State Department issued an official history volume that published it in full, as unclassified. In fact, the unredacted copy was sitting on the agency’s website even as officials sent out to the group the largely expurgated version.

”The fact that someone in the intelligence community apparently sought to redact a 40-plus-year-old document, despite it being in the public sphere already in completely unredacted form, drives at exactly the point we are making about how entire agencies within the government can have competing views on what is sensitive and what is not,” Clinton presidential campaign spokesman Brian Fallon told POLITICO. “This is a window into the phenomenon of overclassification that is currently bottling up the review of former Secretary Clinton’s emails.”

During the conference call, Palmieri and Fallon called attention to a Fox News report identifying two of the emails the intelligence community flagged as containing classified information: an April 2011 message Clinton aide Huma Abedin forwarded to her about possible evacuation of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens from Libya and a September 2012 message forwarded by State’s Director of Policy Planning Jake Sullivan about arrests in Libya possibly linked to the attacks on U.S. facilities there — violence that left Stevens and three other Americans dead.

“The emails at issue were written by career foreign service officers,” Fallon said, noting that neither message was marked classified at the time. The 2011 email is actually marked “SBU” — meaning “sensitive but unclassified.”

“When you look at these emails. … We think it vindicates our point,” he said.

Fallon emphasized that Clinton’s top aides had simply forwarded the messages to her.

He said it would be odd for her or her aides to substitute their judgment for those who compiled the information in the first place. Clinton “was, at worst, the passive recipient of unwitting information that subsequently became deemed as classified,” he said. “When it comes to classified information, the standards are not at all black and white. … We think this matter is mostly just shining a spotlight on the culture of classification in certain corners of the government.”

National Security Archive Executive Director Tom Blanton said Wednesday that the withholding of information already formally published by the government — as occurred with the transcript sent to his group — underscores the unpredictable nature of the classified information process.

“This is the very definition of arbitrary and capricious,” Blanton said in an interview. “That’s the deep problem with the classification system, everybody who leaves the system looks back and says, ‘Wow, more than half, maybe three-quarters, of what I saw marked classified didn’t deserve to be but people on the inside are busy using their enforcement authority to keep people in line.”

The State Department has classified about 60 of Clinton’s emails prior to release under the Freedom of Information Act. Intelligence agencies have said at least four more should be classified, two of them at the ‘TOP SECRET” level. However, State officials have said they dispute that claim and have submitted the issue for review by the director of National Intelligence.

A State Department spokesman had no comment Wednesday on why the agency withheld portions of the Kissinger transcript it released eight years ago. However, notations on the redacted document indicate it was classified in 2004 at the CIA’s request. It’s unclear if State reviewed the document classification again or consulted the Foreign Relations of the United States volume published in 2007 before recently releasing the whited-out copy.

Republicans, meanwhile, kept up their drumbeat of criticism.

“All Hillary Clinton’s emails show is just how reckless her secret server really was,” Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Short said. “At the end of the day, Hillary Clinton broke multiple regulations and put top secret information at risk all because she wanted to get around government transparency laws. Her campaign’s latest attempt at misdirection and finger-pointing doesn’t change that.”

Blanton said the confusion about the Kissinger transcript shows that State should stand its ground in the current dispute over Clinton’s emails.

“This document shows what the intelligence community reviewers would like to do with Hillary Clinton’s emails,” he said. “This is why the State Department should not give in to pressure to retroactively classify information that circulated on an unclassified system. … It’s a double standard. What the intelligence community wants to call classified, they get away with calling it classified.”