“As a longtime critic of the government’s massive overclassification, I thought it was a refreshing touch that the secretary of state conducted all her email in unclassified form,” said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. He spoke with a hint of sarcasm — his nonprofit organization has battled the government for decades to overcome classification claims and try to make important official documents public…
A former senior State Department official who served before the Obama administration said that while it was hard to be certain, it seemed unlikely that classified information could be kept out of the more than 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton’s staff identified as involving government business.
“I would assume that more than 50 percent of what the secretary of state dealt with was classified,” said the former official, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to seem ungracious to Mrs. Clinton. “Was every single email of the secretary of state completely unclassified? Maybe, but it’s hard to imagine.”
Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said he suspected that if there had been no fuss and a researcher or journalist had sought all of Mrs. Clinton’s emails under the Freedom of Information Act, the answer might have been different.
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