Blow to Clinton’s campaign, as USA confirms her emails were ‘Top Secret’

State Department Spokesman John Kirby said at a briefing on Friday afternoon that the State Department will not be releasing 18 emails exchanged between President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state that have been found on Clinton’s private email server.

Clinton, who served as secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, has long maintained that she did not send or received information that was classified at the time, which Kirby said on Friday was the case.

This is the same server she claimed was never used to send or receive emails contained any classified information.

In the same briefing, Kirby said that the State Department also would not be releasing seven email chains including 37 pages because these emails contain what he called “a category of top secret information”. It’s unclear what information was in those emails, but it was the first time the State Department acknowledged Clinton’s email correspondence contained “top secret” information, pushing the issue back into the spotlight just days before the first votes of the 2016 election are cast. No emails released so far were stamped “CLASSIFIED” or “TOP SECRET”, but reviewers previously had designated more than 1,000 messages at lower classification levels for public release.

Mrs Clinton’s campaign reacted with fury to the announcement, demanding that the emails be released in full in order to defuse a burgeoning scandal that could critically damage her 2016 presidential hopes.

Calling for the release of the allegedly top secret emails is a smart gambit by the Clinton folks since it makes them look as if they have nothing to hide while being protected by the near-certainty that the State Department won’t simply change its mind on the release because the Clinton team asked them to. “What I can tell you, Catherine, is that in consultation with the intelligence community, we are making this upgrade”.

Neither Kirby nor other officials would discuss the emails now being withheld, but the classified emails include those cited in a letter sent to the Senate on January 14 by the inspector general of the nation’s intelligence agencies, I. Charles McCullough III. And rather tell the American people the truth, Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and her friends in the Obama Administration have obfuscated and misled at every available opportunity.

Friday was supposed to be the deadline for releasing all of the 33,000 emails from the server, but officials have appealed for an extension of the deadline. “We adamantly oppose the complete blocking of the release of these emails”.

“This appears to be over-classification run amok”, the campaign said in statement.

The department published its latest batch of emails from her time as U.S. secretary of state. She has yet to answer questions that bore in on the irrelevance of her continued protestations in the Clinton style.

Clinton’s chief Democratic rival, Sen.

“The only reason to hold Secretary Clinton responsible for emails that didn’t originate with her is for political points, and that’s what we’ve seen over the past several months”. “They’re required to keep those secrets for life, not say them on air, not put them in a book, and not take them with them when they leave government”.

In response to a public records lawsuit, the State Department is releasing Clinton’s emails at the end of each month after partially or entirely redacting any containing sensitive USA or foreign government information.