You won’t see 22 of Hillary Clinton’s emails; they’re now top secret

Hillary Clinton’s unsecured home server contained 22 emails deemed “top secret” – one of the highest levels of classification in the US government – the US State Department has said.

While previous releases of Clinton’s emails have shown that she and her staff communicated directly with Kerry when he was a senator, the new email is the first from Kerry that the State Department has determined contains sensitive information.

Clinton initially said she never sent or received classified information through her email.

He said the documents have been marked as highly sensitive “at the request of the intelligence community because they contain a category of top secret information”.

The State Department on Friday refused to make public 22 emails from Clinton’s server marked “top secret”. Officials said that almost 1,000 pages of Clinton’s emails would be released yesterday but, as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, it was required to finish the production on Friday and reveal the remaining 9,900 pages of the Secretary’s emails.

As Clinton continues to deny any email containing classified material, she uses the defense that none of the emails sent or received stated they were, indeed, classified, therefore she is using that to her defense.

Her campaign says the emails weren’t classified when they were first sent. She has yet to answer questions that bore in on the irrelevance of her continued protestations in the Clinton style.

When he retweeted the news, Jeb Bush said the country needed a president who could be trusted: “Obviously that’s not @Hillary Clinton”.

Clinton once again called for the emails to be released.

It comes three days before she competes in the Iowa presidential caucuses – the first time the public will cast their votes in the run-up to November’s election.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said the material crosses seven email chains, amounting to 37 pages’ worth of material. Bernie Sanders in Iowa, which holds caucuses that open the 2016 primary calendar on Monday.

“I can’t speak to the specifics of anything with respect to the technicalities, the contents … because that’s not our job”, he said, according to Reuters.

The Friday afternoon interview came as her campaign issued an official statement about the e-Mails, in which it insists that she wants them released, not withheld by the State Department. Security experts assess that as unlikely, and that the vast majority of her emails were preserved properly for archiving purposes because she corresponded mainly with government accounts.

Of course, it remains unclear what the “top secret” emails were about.

“This is very much like Benghazi”, Clinton said on ABC’s “This Week”, referring to a heated political debate over her handling of the 2012 terrorist attacks.

“We firmly oppose the complete blocking of the release of these emails”, said Hillary Clinton’s campaign spokesman, Biran Fallon.

At a news conference at the United Nations last March, Clinton told the press that, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email”. In a letter to the US Senate, Mr. McCullough wrote that several of Clinton’s e-mails contained information pertaining to top secret or Special Access Programs (S.A.P.s), and therefore would have to be classified. Kirby said the department’s decision to not include messages between Clinton and the president had been “widely covered months ago”.