Some 22 ‘top secret’ emails on Clinton’s server

The US government has confirmed that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s home server contained closely-guarded government secrets, censoring 22 emails that contained material requiring one of the highest levels of classification.

“The seven emails, or a few emails at any rate, are being withheld at the request of the intelligence community itself”, he told reporters.

They were supposed to be the last batch of emails from Clinton’s private emails, but the State Department last week asked for a delay in releasing all of them, blaming it on an inter-agency delay.

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”. The State Department said none of the messages were marked top secret at the time they were sent-although it is looking into whether they should have been.

“We continue to process the next set of former Secretary Clinton’s emails for release under the FOIA process and will have more to say about it later”, a State Department official told Fox News. “We firmly oppose the complete blocking of the release of these emails”, declared campaign spokesman Brian Fallon. As we’ve explained previously, tonight’s release will not meet the court’s due date for producing all of the remaining emails, but we are still striving to produce as many documents as possible today.

Department officials would not describe the substance of the emails or say if Mrs Clinton sent any herself.

In the build-up to Friday’s release, several leaks to USA media suggested that highly secret information had been found on Mrs Clinton’s private server, which she used while in office instead of an official government account. However, it is the responsibility of individual government officials to handle classified material appropriately, including by properly marking it as classified, and the finding means that information deemed highly sensitive passed through the unsecured system that Clinton directed be established for her use.

Clinton’s campaign released a statement on Friday calling for a release of all the emails.

He added, though, that the messages had not been designated as top secret when they were sent, though the department “is focusing on whether they need to be classified today”.

“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 risky”, Cotton said. Questions about their past classification, he said, “are being, and will be, handled separately by the State Department”.

Even the House intelligence committee says Mrs. Clinton had to know they were classified.

The department announced that 18 emails exchanged between Mrs. Clinton and President Obama would also be withheld, citing the longstanding practice of preserving presidential communications for future release. Some of her Republican rivals for the presidency, including New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, have called for her prosecution.

Some 30,000 emails were deleted without anyone outside State reviewing them, although those emails were reportedly later recovered by federal investigators.