State Department entirely withholds 22 ‘top secret’ Clinton emails

“Not presidential material!” GOP frontrunner Donald Trump tweeted after the State Department said Friday that it will withhold 22 emails from Clinton’s correspondence as secretary of state because they are classified “top secret”.

“We now know Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email account during her tenure at the State Department wasn’t just negligent, it was completely unsafe”, Cotton said.

Seven email chains are being withheld in their entirety from a release scheduled later Friday for including “top secret” information.

Kirby said the State Department was separately investigating whether those emails should have been marked classified at the time.

In July, after the State Department began retroactively classifying many of Clinton’s emails, she revised her claim saying that she was “confident” that she “never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time it was sent or received”.

Clinton retained a slim 3-point lead over rival Bernie Sanders in the final poll released before Monday’s caucuses, and her backers hope the latest email flap does not discourage Iowans from voting for her on Monday. “We firmly oppose the complete blocking of the release of these emails”, declared campaign spokesman Brian Fallon.

US State Department officials didn’t describe the substance of the emails, or even reveal whether Clinton sent any of them herself.

The report said Clinton, as the nation’s top diplomat, presided over information that concerned “operational intelligence” but allowed it to pass through her private, home-brew email server.

Hillary, if not your personal server, how did you receive and send classified information? He said that, regardless, the information was deemed too sensitive Friday for release.

It is Clinton’s inept attempts to dismiss serious questions as being politically motivated, as well as her many differing defenses for doing something that was plainly wrong, that are creating serious cracks in her bid to win the Democratic nomination and succeed Barack Obama as president of the United States. “We will pursue all appropriate avenues to see that her emails are released in a manner consistent with her call a year ago”. For now, she soldiers on, but the slow drip of emails from her private server continues to serve Hillary’s political prospects poorly.

Dianne Feinstein officially weighed in on the Hillary email scandal with parsed and guarded words, some of which shift the focus and obviously were designed for Democrat primary impact. A campaign statement said the development is an example of “bureaucratic infighting” over the degree of classification that should be placed on the emails and “over-classification run amok”.

The State Department released another batch of Mrs Clinton’s e-mails on Friday.

“In consultation with the intelligence community, we are making this upgrade and we believe it’s the prudent, responsible thing to do.”, State Department spokesman John Kirby said.

“I’ll spend the rest of my career trying to figure out what classified information was in those (deleted emails)”, a Pentagon counterintelligence official told the Observer. Thousands of pages of Clinton’s emails have been marked with a lower level of classification.