A Claim of No Classified E-mails in a Place That Classifies Routinely

Anyone who has tried to pry information from the federal government may have been surprised by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s assertion that in all her e-mails in four years as secretary of state, she never strayed into the classified realm.

After all, a consensus among Republicans and Democrats for many years has been that the government routinely overclassifies information, reflexively stamping “secret” on mountains of documents with marginally sensitive content. The government classified more than 80 million documents in 2013, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, which publishes an annual count. “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 e-mail in unclassified form,” said Thomas Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. He spoke with a hint of sarcasm -- his nonprofit organization has battled the government for decades to overcome classification claims and try to make important official documents public.