Clinton emails among ‘incomplete’ record searches

Clinton’s critics are now seizing on the email, and say it shows a disregard of the security of classified information.

“The searches performed by S/ES do not consistently meet statutory and regulatory requirements for completeness and rarely meet requirements for timeliness”, the Evaluation of the Department of State’s FOIA Processes for Requests Involving the Office of the Secretary report said.

In one email exchange dated June 2011, Clinton instructed her top policy advisor Jacob Sullivan to send her talking points – which were scheduled to be forwarded over the State Department’s secured network – over a non-secure fax line. When Sullivan tells her that the source is having trouble with the secure fax, Hillary then orders Sullivan to have the data stripped of its markings and sent through a non-secure channel. “They’re working on it. If they can’t, turn into nonpaper [with] no identifying heading and send nonsecure”, she wrote.

Since much of the exchange is redacted, it’s not clear if the document contained classified information or not.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement the agency is “committed to transparency, and the issues addressed in this report have the full attention” of Secretary of State John Kerry. “Secretary Clinton needs to be held accountable and should receive no special treatment from the Department of Justice”. In addition, ordering aides to remove headers to facilitate the transmission over unsecured means strongly suggests that the information was not unclassified.

A State Department official told BuzzFeed News that there was no indication that the document discussed in the email was emailed to Clinton. The approximately 2,900 pages, representing 1,262 messages, were released in the same format as the New Year’s Eve release, with none of the documents searchable by sender, recipient or subject.

Grassley questions how long the State Department has been aware of this email, whether Clinton’s instructions were carried out, and whether further inquiries were opened. The FBI launched an inquiry into the handling of sensitive information after classified information was found in some. “I was surprised that he used a personal e-mail account if he was at State”, Clinton replied.

The department said Friday the documents include 65 that contain information that has subsequently been deemed “confidential”, the lowest classification. By the numbers, the latest batch includes 328 emails dubbed classified.

A month earlier, Blumenthal had sent Clinton a note with advice on how President Barack Obama could exploit Hurricane Isaac in his reelection bid against Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) said there is increasing evidence “an enormous amount of information” on Clinton’s private server is classified.

“Is he in NEA now?” Still, the question has lingered as to whether all of those instances where she or her staff broke the law and sent classified info over her unsecure server were unintentional or careless accidents.

The State Department’s most recent action was the release of 7,800 of Clinton’s emails.