CITY, Canada-US Secretary of State John Kerry refused to say Friday whether his predecessor Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server to send emails now deemed to have contained top secret information had threatened national security. Those questions, he said, “are being, and will be, handled separately by the State Department”, indicating that the State Department is looking into Mrs. Clinton’s claim that she “never sent or received any e-mail that was deemed classified, that was marked classified”.
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“With even more emails on her secret server found to contain “top secret” information, Hillary Clinton has removed all doubt that she can not be trusted with the presidency”, said Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee.
The US State Department said for the 1st time Friday that 22 e-Mails requiring one of the highest levels of Top Secret classification were on Mrs. Clinton’s unsecured home server. It’s unclear what information was in those emails, but it was the first time the State Department acknowledged Clinton’s email correspondence contained “top secret” information, pushing the issue back into the spotlight just days before the first votes of the 2016 election are cast.
A Riverside County lawmaker weighed in today on the email-gate scandal swirling around Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, saying she believed it was “long past the time for indictment” of the former secretary of state.
The inspector general of American intelligence agencies, I. Charles McCullough III, disagrees.
The FBI is investigating the matter, which has raised questions about how federal agencies have different rules for classifying information and whether some of the emails were marked classified after the fact.
The Clinton campaign demanded Friday that the emails be released in full. One of these emails was also among those identified by the ICIG last summer as possibly containing top secret information. We will pursue all appropriate avenues to see that her emails are released in a manner consistent with her call past year.
The timing of this announcement could not have come at a worse time for Hillary – the critical Iowa caucuses are on Monday. “We firmly oppose the complete blocking of the release of these emails”, declared campaign spokesman Brian Fallon.
“This appears to be over-classification run amok”, the campaign said in statement.
For this reason, even absent 36 CFR 1236.24 (Oct 2, 2009), Clinton should have made sure all of her government emails were secured at the State Department.
The emails have been a Clinton campaign issue since 10 months ago, when The Associated Press discovered her exclusive use while in office of an email server in the basement of her family’s NY home.
When an ABC interviewer mentioned that Sanders was getting “slapped with” the label of “democratic socialist”, which the Vermont senator uses himself, Sanders replied, “Look at the front pages today in terms of what Secretary Clinton is getting slapped with… the emails”. The US government’s decision will now add newer problems to Clinton at a time when she is seeking to retain her frontrunner position in the Democratic presidential nomination race. They wouldn’t say if Clinton or senior aides who’ve since left government could face penalties.
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The department and intelligence officials have been arguing about the emails, which are being made public under a federal court order, for at least five months.
