Hillary Clinton may say she never sent any classified information using her personal email account, but experts and former government officials aren't so sure. As the New York Times reports, both Democrats and Republicans believe the government tends to err on the side of "overclassification" when it comes to making documents secret—more than 80 million documents were classified in 2013—making it difficult to believe that Clinton somehow managed to avoid sending information considered sensitive. "As a longtime critic of the government's massive overclassification, I thought it was a refreshing touch that the secretary of state conducted all her email in unclassified form," says the director of George Washington University's National Security Archive with what the Times calls "a hint of sarcasm."
Clinton's staff has identified more than 30,000 emails as pertaining to government business, and a former senior State Department official says it's "hard to imagine" none of those were classified. By his estimate, he says, “I would assume that more than 50% of what the secretary of state dealt with was classified." And another expert notes that, had a journalist made a FOIA request for all of Clinton's email before news of her personal account broke, "it would have been a real surprise if none of it was withheld on the grounds of classification." But, he adds, "there's zero chance that she'll be charged with unauthorized retention of classified information, because she decides what's classified." Clinton also traveled with aides who could have sent classified material from their accounts on her behalf. Politico reports that about 900 pages of emails relating to Benghazi will be released soon. (More Hillary Clinton stories.)