Seven email chains from Clinton server contain ‘top secret’ material

The State Department is releasing a new batch of emails on Friday, all from when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, but they will withhold 22 of them.

In total seven email chains, covering 37 pages, are being withheld from scrutiny for containing material that could do “exceptionally grave” damage to national security if disclosed.

Administration officials had promised to release roughly 2,000 pages of Clinton’s emails on Friday, but said they would not meet a court deadline for releasing the final 7,000 pages.

“The documents are being upgraded at the request of the intelligence community because they contain a category of top secret information”, he said, though adding that “these documents were not marked classified at the time they were sent”.

US Representative Adam Schiff of California, the House Intelligence Committee’s leading Democrat, defended Clinton in a statement, saying classification determinations are “often very complex” and she was “responding to world events in real time without the benefit of months of analysis after the fact”.

Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said that Clinton said the emails should be released and called at least one case, “over-classification run amok”.

Clinton’s use of a home email server was not expressly forbidden or illegal, but she acknowledged that the decision was probably a mistake.

He also indicated that the one-month extension would not apply for these and that Clinton or her staff may not have marked the emails properly.

It is unclear how this latest revelation in the ongoing investigation to Clinton’s emails and her private server will affect her campaign, but it certainly can’t help.

Like Clinton, the State Department discounted such a possibility last March. Since then, there’s been controversy about whether sensitive exchanges were prone to hacking or leaking.

Kirby confirmed the “denied-in-full emails” are among those McCullough recently cited. Such operations are widely discussed in the public sphere, including by top USA officials, and the State Department immediately argued with McCullough’s claim.

At the time, several officials from different agencies suggested the disagreement over the drone emails reflected the government’s tendency to overclassify material, and the lack of consistent policies across difference agencies about what should and shouldn’t be classified. Several of the GOP candidates in last night’s Fox News channel debate also used the issue to cast doubt on Clinton’s trustworthiness, and those candidates pointed out that the FBI is investigating, too.

“What I would hope comes out of all of this is a bit of humility” and Clinton’s acknowledgement that “I made some serious mistakes”, said Bradley Moss, a Washington lawyer specializing in security clearance matters. Twenty-two emails were so highly confidential that they required the highest level of classification, a report by the Associated Press reveals.