Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, rose to the defense of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, saying Thursday there is no evidence she herself sent classified information and that the emails now under scrutiny were not marked classified at the time she sent them.
She said as someone who regularly handles classified material herself, the emails she’s seen don’t indicate that they were classified, suggesting that Mrs. Clinton wasn’t breaking any rules by handling that information on an email server she set up herself at her home in New York, rather than using the State Department’s regular system.
“Every official who writes classified material, whether in email or on paper, must mark the information as classified,” Mrs. Feinstein, California Democrat, said in a statement released by her congressional office. “They would also be required to use a separate classified email system to transmit the information. The emails identified did not contain these markings.
Earlier this week a former chairman of the House intelligence committee, former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, charged that Mrs. Clinton had to have known that the information she was emailing was classified, even if it wasn’t so marked at the time.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.