While a judge had ordered the department to release all of the emails by the end of January, lawyers for the department said this week that they would miss the deadline and requested another month.
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During the first Democratic debate past year, Sanders famously dismissed the issue by saying, “the American people are sick and exhausted of hearing about your damn emails!” The department has released other classified emails with some redactions.
This is the first time her emails have been labelled classified at any level.
He said the emails would not be disclosed, even with blacked-out boxes, as the agency released more of the emails from Clinton’s tenure as the country’s top diplomat. The final poll released before Monday’s caucuses by the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg Politics show the two candidates neck-and-neck with Clinton holding a three-point lead over Sanders within the margin of error.
Kerry took over the State Department in February 2013 and his predecessor Clinton has gone on to become the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in the 2016 race to the White House. Her campaign spokesman objected to the newly classified material as “over-classification run amok”. Eleven include “secret” information.
“To be clear, the emails between then-secretary [Mrs] Clinton and President Obama have not been determined to be classified”, he said.
The e-mail scandal that has been plaguing Mrs Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign took a potentially damaging turn when the State Department declared 22 e-mail messages that passed through her private computer server “top secret”.
Her campaign returned to this theme in her statement.
Officials say the State Department’s Diplomatic Security and Intelligence and Research bureaus are investigating if any of the information was classified at the time of transmission. That despite there being regulations and rules against federal officials using private email accounts. The FBI launched an inquiry into the handling of sensitive information after classified information was found in some of the emails.
While those messages have gotten the most attention, the State Department also released another batch of more than 900 of her emails Friday, and deemed 11 of them to contain “secret” information and 229 to contain confidential data – a staggering 26 percent classification rate.
Also, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein observed, the fact that the emails were sent to Clinton and that none of them originated with her is also relevant. The inspector general of the intelligence community has indicated that he believes some of the emails contain “top secret” material, the highest level of classification. Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement. The State Department said none of the messages were marked top secret at the time they were sent-although it is looking into whether they should have been. We feel no differently today. They argue that in one case, the emails appear to involve information from a published news article. “The best way to resolve is to do what I asked months ago – release these, let the public see them, and let’s move on”.
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As a career public servant Hillary should have realized that any correspondence issued or received by a Secretary of State had the potential of being retroactively labeled top secret.
