FBI Documents Show State Department Fought Classification of Clinton Emails

Released pages suggest official pressured government bureaucracy into marking few, if any, emails as classified.

A State Department official in 2015 tried to keep the Federal Bureau of Investigation from marking a Hillary Clinton email as classified, according to documents that reveal the extent to which officials sought to reduce the number of messages judged to contain national secrets.

The move by the State Department, which came after questions were raised about Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, focused on a single email about the probe into the 2012 attacks on U.S. outposts in Benghazi, Libya. The newly released summaries of FBI interviews show one State official pressed the FBI not to mark one message classified, and that senior State officials exerted similar pressure within their own agency as it studied the Clinton emails.

Each email judged to be classified, even more than two years after Mrs. Clinton left the State Department, represented another potential mark against not just the State Department, but also Mrs. Clinton’s claims she did nothing wrong and didn’t compromise national secrets.

The FBI announced in July, after an investigation, that while it had found “extremely careless” conduct in Mrs. Clinton’s email use, evidence didn’t merit filing criminal charges.

Other emails, hacked by the WikiLeaks organization and involving Clinton campaign officials, continue to be released daily.

According to the newly released documents, Patrick Kennedy, a senior official at the State Department, repeatedly reached out to senior FBI officials seeking to get them to reverse their opinion that an email about the Benghazi attacks, which had no classification markings on it, should be classified.

FBI officials weren’t convinced the email should be unclassified, according to the written summaries of interviews. One official’s account said Mr. Kennedy suggested that in exchange for marking the email unclassified, “State would reciprocate by allowing the FBI to place more agents in countries where they are presently forbidden,” according to a summary of the FBI interview of the unidentified witness.

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