United States to withhold some Clinton emails with top secret information

The State department for the first time acknowledged that “top secret” information has been found in emails sent through her private serveThe State Department reiterated Friday that “these documents were not marked classified at the time they were sent”, something the Clinton campaign has been arguing the whole time.

The emails have been a Clinton campaign issue since 10 months ago, when The Associated Press discovered her exclusive use while in office of an email server in the basement of her family’s NY home. Some may have been written by other State Department officials, and then forwarded by Clinton aides.

The State Department has recently released another batch of 5,500 pages of Clinton’s personal emails from her time as secretary of state, raising the total pages released so far to over 40,000.

Some of the 22 emails found on Hillary Clinton’s private unsecured server that were too damaging to publicly release contained “operational intelligence”, such as the names of CIA officers and informants living overseas, unnamed intelligence officials told Fox News.

State’s reviewers had said that more than 1,300 Clinton emails contained classified material but the vast majority were just “confidential”, a lower level of sensitivity.

Three days until the Iowa caucuses and the candidates are in full-court press mode to woo the voters, but democratic front runner Hillary Clinton has a major distraction back in Washington.

The State Department initially maintained that Clinton might have obtained the same information independently through non-classified channels. Her political opponents, both Republican and Democrat, have frequently used her emails to attack and criticize her.

“This seems to be over-categorization run amok”, it said in statement.

Clinton has repeatedly said that she did not send or receive any emails marked as classified at that time.

“State Department staff have been working extremely hard to process these emails and we are committed to getting them out”, State Department Mark Toner said last week.

Letter-writer Jo Ann York, a retired foreign service officer, misses the point of all the criticism directed towards Hillary Clinton regarding Benghazi. The department also announced that 18 emails exchanged between Mrs. Clinton and President Barack Obama would not be available to the public but John Kirby, the department’s spokesman, clarified the emails did not contain classified information. While her Republican presidency rivals are demanding Clinton’s prosecution.

However, Levin said, the bar to filing such charges is high: Federal prosecutors would have to prove that Clinton knew she was discussing classified information, even if it wasn’t marked as classified at the time. But as is often the case with the Democratic presidential candidate, she dodged the question and gave an inconsistent answer. “This flies in the face of the fact that these emails were unmarked at the time they were sent, and have been called “innocuous” by certain intelligence officials”.

Clinton’s statement to Stephanopoulos about the inability to transfer “information off the classified system in the State Department to put onto an unclassified system” also fails to hold water.