State Department declares 22 Clinton emails ‘top secret’

Although emails previously released by the State Department have been partially redacted due to the nature of the information they contained, this was the first time entire messages were withheld.

Clinton kept a private email server at her NY home. Both said her account was never hacked or compromised, which security experts assess as unlikely.

The emails were not marked as classified at the time they were sent.

CORNISH: That’s NPR’s Carrie Johnson on the latest release of Hillary Clinton’s emails during her time as secretary of state.

– It remains unclear if the information could have come from publicly available sources despite now being classified as “top secret”.

The decision by the State Department to withhold the emails, and not provide even a partial release with redactions, undercuts claims by the Department and the Clinton campaign that none of the intelligence in the emails was classified when it hit Mrs. Clinton’s personal server.

The State Department has asked for additional time to vet Clinton’s messages because of the impact of Storm Jonas on Washington DC on 23 and 24 January.

Another 18 emails, from eight email chains, sent between then secretary Clinton and President Barack Obama will also not be released as part of the scheduled Friday night document dump.

While maintaining significant leads in national polls, Clinton has struggled to address voters’ concerns about her trustworthiness, exacerbated by the revelation that she had maintained a private email server at her home.

Clinton didn’t address the controversy during a campaign stop in Iowa Friday, but Republicans were quick to pounce.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said the material crosses seven email chains, amounting to 37 pages worth of material. But the State Department says the emails do contain sensitive information.

Last March, Clinton and the State Department said no business conducted in the emails included top-secret matters. “We [adamantly] oppose the complete blocking of the release of these emails”. Past classification questions, he said, “are being, and will be, handled separately by the State Department”.

This month’s batch was supposed to be the final one and include more than 9,000 pages of documents, the largest number to date. The lawyers indicated that the department discovered several weeks ago that the documents still needed review and had not yet been distributed, a process that was further slowed by the weekend blizzard, which shut down government for days.

The Clinton campaign has, understandably, been thrown off the rails and released a statement in the aftermath of the declaration by the State Department, in fact asking the intelligence community to release her emails.

“I think it’s great”.

Democrats need to get a grip and a Plan B. If Clinton is beaten in Iowa, they must decide if they are prepared to accept the possibility of Sen.

In December 2014, Clinton submitted 30,000 emails to the State Department from her private account – adding up to 55,000 pages of correspondence the department has been slowly making public.