The Obama administration confirmed for the first time Friday that Hillary Clinton’s unsecured home server contained closely guarded government secrets, censoring 22 emails with material requiring one of the highest levels of classification.
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“We can confirm that later today, as part of our monthly [Freedom of Information Act] productions of former secretary Clinton’s emails, the State Department will be denying in full seven email chains”, he said.
The 37 pages include messages a key intelligence official recently said concerned “special access programmes” – highly restricted, classified material that could point to confidential sources or clandestine programmes like drone strikes.
“I’m not going to speak to the content of these documents”, said State Department spokesman John Kirby at a briefing with reporters.
When Clinton started serving as secretary of state in 2009, rather than using the government-issued email account, she set up a server and account in her NY home, but didn’t properly secure it to handle classified information.
The State Department also said it would agree with a request from the White House that Clinton’s emails with President Barack Obama, 18 in all, be withheld from public release for several years under the Presidential Records Act.
“This is overclassification run amok”, Clinton’s campaign spokesman, Brian Fallon, tweeted after the report was published.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been looking into the security of that set-up, and Clinton has faced criticism from Republicans and some fellow Democrats over her use of a server outside the regular State Department system. Her campaign on Friday questioned the secrecy of the messages and called for the State Department to release them. In recent weeks she has more often said none of her emails were marked that way.
Clinton’s chief Democratic rival, Sen. As we’ve explained previously, tonight’s release will not meet the court’s due date for producing all of the remaining emails, but we are still striving to produce as many documents as possible today.
And the issue continues as the FBI investigates the matter and presidential candidates, now including Democrat Bernie Sanders, use it to try to discredit Clinton.
You know, you can’t get information off the classified system in the State Department to put onto an unclassified system, no matter what that system is. “She has now definitively – without any question – lied to us”. “It’s not enough to prove she was negligent”, Levin said.
The intelligence community has deemed some of Clinton’s emails “too damaging” to national security to release under any circumstances, a US government official close to the ongoing review told Fox News. Not only were they top secret, they were operational.
In a separate interview on “This Week”, Sanders declined to attack Clinton over her email use, though he did say she was “getting slapped” by the controversy. It’s a foregone conclusion that Russian Federation and China hacked her private server, and even ISIS may have intercepted her messages.
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They have asked to release the final batch messages on 29 February, which is after the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.
