Some officials said they believed that the designations were a stretch – a knee-jerk move in a bureaucracy rife with overclassification. The content of the emails themselves, in fact, wasn’t even that surprising.
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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton got a much-needed boost at the end of a troubled week when she won the endorsement of the worldwide Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), a news release said.
Secretary of State Clinton had “possession” of “Top Secret” information, which according to federal regulations (18 C.F.R. 3a.11) means it was “national security information or material which… its unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security”. That inspector general is the U.S. intelligence community’s inspector general, Charles McCullough III. Some said it improperly points back to highly classified material, while others countered that it was a classic case of what the government calls “parallel reporting” – receiving information the government considers secret through “open source” channels.
The emails came to light Tuesday after Sen.
Hillary Clinton’s brewing scandal – in which she used her own, private Internet server to send and receive sensitive, classified U.S. documents while she served as the secretary of state, has been given new impetus. The State Department is reviewing the remaining two emails to determine their level of classification when they were sent.
And dozens and dozens of State Department employees used Clinton’s private email account to address a host of global issues, including a coup in Honduras, the military drawdown in Afghanistan, a conflict on the Azerbaijan border and security in Libya.
Some of those emails were partially redacted, but this one was not, indicating that the State Department did not consider the material it contained to be particularly sensitive.
For servers that contain Top Secret information, “you would have to have very compartmentalized clearance to see”. Dianne Feinstein a California Democrat who is the ranking member on the intelligence committee, said in a statement. Revelations that two aides also used the system further suggest that her goal was to keep her communications secret.
She, meanwhile, has been facing questions over the allegations of accessing a private e-mail server during her tenure as Secretary of State.
The Clinton campaign has tried to portray the decision to turn over the server as voluntary on her part.
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Among the emails Clinton turned over for review was one in which she asks to borrow the book “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better“. She said another 31,830 personal messages – including yoga routines and condolence messages – were deleted. The department is reviewing those emails and has begun the process of releasing them to the public.
