Some may have been written by other State Department officials, and then forwarded by Clinton aides.
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Kirby said the State Department has not yet made a determination of whether the information was classified at the time it was sent or has become more sensitive because of subsequent events.
None of Clinton’s emails was marked as classified during her tenure, State Department officials say, but intelligence officials say some material was clearly classified at the time.
“We don’t know about it. It’s in other hands”, he said, explaining that the State Department’s responsibility was to release the mails according to a Freedom of Information Act order and not to comment on their contents.
“The documents are being upgraded at the request of the intelligence community because they contain a category of top secret information”, state department spokesman John Kirby said, calling the withholding of documents in full “not unusual”.
“Dianne Feinstein, member of the [Senate] Intelligence Committee, who has had a chance to review them, has said that this e-mail chain did not originate with me and that there were no classification markings”.
‘The Department asked the court for a one month extension, to February 29th, to finish our production of former Secretary Clinton’s emails, ‘ State deputy spokesperson Mark Toner said in an emailed statement to Politico.
“We continue to process the next set of former Secretary Clinton’s emails for release under the FOIA process and will have more to say about it later”, a State Department official told Fox News. “In the State Department, to put it on to an unclassified system, no matter what that system is”.
McCollough wrote that “several dozen emails” contained classified information, including some now determined to contain information at the “top secret/SAP” level. It also surfaced just over a week since it was revealed that Clinton’s server contained “special access programme” or SAP.
The State Department has been ordered by a federal judge to release all of Clinton’s emails by Friday in response to a public records lawsuit.
The Clinton campaign issued a statement Friday denying the documents contain any sensitive government secrets. But this is the first time that entire chains are being withheld. “This is unacceptable, this is a disqualifier”, said Marco Rubio, Republican presidential contender.
“I’m not willing to say it was an error in judgment because nothing I did was wrong”, she said. “They would be fired, and they would be prosecuted”.
Appearing on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos, Hillary Clinton dismissed the email issue as “a continuation of the story that has been playing out for months”. Bernie Sanders in Iowa, which holds caucuses that open the 2016 primary calendar on Monday. It was not clear which article she was referring to; the use of drones has been the subject of numerous news reports and books.
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From the onset of this investigation, Hillary has and still claims she never sent or received classified material. The FBI is also probing Clinton’s use of a private email server.
