APNewsBreak: Gov’t finds ‘top secret’ info in Clinton emails

The State Department has concluded there is “top secret” material in Hillary Clinton’s email correspondence from the time she was secretary of state, indicating that some of her emails will never be released, even in heavily redacted form, because they are too sensitive for the public to view.

Ms Clinton’s home server account had 37 pages of messages which contained what a key intelligence official called “special access programs” – material that could point to confidential sources or programs like drone strikes or government eavesdropping.

The State Department will release more emails from Clinton’s time as secretary of state later Friday.

The revelation comes three days before Clinton – the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination – goes to battle in the Iowa caucus, the first time the public will cast ballots on the long road to Election Day in November.

“This is overclassification run amok”, Clinton’s campaign spokesman, Brian Fallon, tweeted after the report was published. The State Department said that its Diplomatic Security and Intelligence and Research bureaus are looking into whether the emails contained information that was classified at the time they were sent.

Clinton has said none of her emails were marked classified when they were sent.

It first became known 10 months ago that Ms Clinton had used a person email account linked to a homebrew server for potentially classified information and it has formed a shadow over her campaign.

“State has experienced some difficulty contacting some of the appropriate agency personnel since the snow storm and is still making arrangements with some of the receiving agencies for secure delivery of the documents”, the department lawyers wrote, emphasizing that these represent a small portion of the total remaining emails. The department has so far released approximately 42,000 pages of Clinton’s correspondence.

The lawyers said there are 9,000 more pages left to review and release.

The emails have been publishing over the last eight months more or less in accordance with a schedule set by Judge Rudolph Contreras, with increasingly large batches uploaded to a State Department website at the end of each month. “And as we have seen there is a lot…” The department has already released thousands of pages of Clinton emails.