According to the FBI notes, State Department Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy contacted an FBI official whose name was censored. Kennedy was a close aide to Clinton during her tenure as the nation’s top diplomat between 2009 and early 2013.
An FBI official in the International Operations division said that in May or June of last year Kennedy asked him for “assistance in changing a classification of FBI information contained in an email,” according to the FBI records. Changing the classification, Kennedy told the FBI official “would allow him to archive the document in the basement of the [State Department] never to be seen again,” the interview document said, and the official -- who did not yet know what was in the email -- told Kennedy “he would look into the email matter if Kennedy would provide authority concerning the FBI’s request to increase its personnel in Iraq.”
But after their conversation, the FBI official said that he found out that the email was related to the 2012 Benghzai consulate attacks. Then, he said he contacted Kennedy and “informed him that there was no way he could assist Kennedy with declassifying the information contained in the email,” according to the FBI records.
But an FBI official who works in the Records Management division had another version of the story. He told FBI investigators that the State Department had sent five emails from Clinton’s private email account to the FBI to vet the emails before they were publicly released. The State Department official had said that all of the emails had been transmitted to him on a classified system, yet they were marked unclassified. The FBI determined that one of those emails “appeared classified,” a finding that was reported back to the State Department, and then contested by the Office of Legal Counsel. The FBI maintained that the email had been classified appropriately.
Then, the first FBI official -- the one from the International Operations division -- called to pressure the second FBI official to change the status to unclassified, “indicat[ing] that he had been contacted by Patrick Kennedy ... who had asked his assistance in altering the email’s classification in exchange for a ‘quid pro quo.’ [The FBI International Operations division official] advised 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,” the FBI record said.
The FBI official from Records Management then attended a State Department meeting about the Clinton emails, where someone asked if any of the emails in question were classified. Undersecretary Kennedy responded, “Well, we’ll see” -- while making eye contact with the FBI official, who interpreted this as a reference to the single email that the FBI had deemed classified. In a private meeting with Kennedy afterward, the undersecretary of state asked whether the FBI could “see their way to marking the email unclassified?”
If the email remained classified, it would mean that Clinton or her staff had emailed classified information -- Clinton asserted throughout the FBI’s investigation that she did not have any classified emails on her private server. It is not completely clear from what was released by the FBI Monday whether the quid pro quo suggestion originated with the FBI or with Kennedy. In the end, the FBI did not change the classification of the email.
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