Kerry Defends Hillary: ‘There’s a Massive Amount of Overclassification’ at State Dept

Secretary of State John Kerry weighed in on the controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton‘s emails, telling The Huffington Post in an interview that there is a “massive amount of overclassification” at the State Department. He also echoed Clinton’s assurances that nothing she sent or received on her personal email account was marked classified at the time.

“I’m not commenting on the merits of this, generally speaking, because there’s an investigation taking place,” Kerry said. “My responsibility is to get the emails out of here as rapidly as possible so people can make judgments about them.”

The State Department has been under scrutiny from Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi, who say the department has been intentionally stonewalling their efforts to investigate Clinton’s emails related to the 2012 terrorist attack. The department says releasing that information takes time, pending a thorough review of all official documents and correspondence.

“People just stamp it on quickly because it’s a way to be correct if anybody had a judgment that somehow they’d been wrong about whether it should be classified or not, so the easy thing is classify it and put it away,” Kerry said, adding that he has ordered a review of the process.

Watch the video below, via The Huffington Post:

[Image via screengrab / The Huffington Post]

— —

>>Follow Andrew Desiderio (@desiderioDC) on Twitter

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!