David Becker/Reuters
A Reuters investigation has found that a portion of emails sent to Hillary Clinton’s private email account as secretary of state were of the kind that the U.S. government considers automatically classified. That category includes “foreign government information,” or “any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts,” which rules say must be “presumed” classified. The former director of the Information Security Oversight Office put it bluntly: “It’s born classified,” he said. “If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by U.S. rules that is classified at the moment it’s in U.S. channels and U.S. possession.” The Clinton presidential campaign declined to comment and the State Department said Reuters’s analysis was incorrect, but did not specify why. Clinton maintains that none of the emails were marked classified at the time they were sent or received.