Sec Kerry: State has 'massive amount of overclassification'

Secretary of State John Kerry said that federal agencies like his own are often overly cautious with sensitive national intelligence. Sec Kerry’s remarks come as his predecessor, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, is facing criticism for using a private e-mail server during her tenure at the State Department. “Well, it’s very tricky -- there’s a massive amount of overclassification,” he said. “People just stamp it on quickly because it’s a way to sort of be correct if anybody had a judgment that somehow they had been wrong about whether it should be classified or not,” Sec Kerry added. “So the easy thing is to classify it and put it away.”

Sec Kerry also argued that no evidence currently exists that Clinton mishandled classified information by using a personal storage device while at State. “One of the judgments that can be made to date is that there is no evidence that something was transmitted that was classified at the time,” he said. “If information came in to somebody’s BlackBerry or on somebody’s e-mail that wasn’t classified, and then was later classified in the system, that’s a whole different ballgame,” Sec Kerry added.