State Department Says 22 of Clinton’s Emails Contain Highly Classified Information

The agency’s Freedom of Information Act department is withholding seven email chains in full in order to protect the highly classified information. The revelation that 37 pages of Clinton’s communications are being held back because they contained classified information raises the legal and political stakes for the Democratic presidential candidate three days before the Iowa caucuses.

The emails were not marked as classified at the time they were sent. But without classification markings, that may have been hard, especially if the information was publicly available.

The decision to withhold the documents in full undermines claims made by the State Department and the Clinton campaign that all of the intelligence in the emails was unclassified when it hit Clinton’s personal server.

But she insisted she never sent sensitive information through the account.

“They are entirely separate and distinct from the emails in today’s release that were upgraded to top secret, secret or confidential, and I’m not going to speak again to the content of the email traffic”. This is the first time the department has said it is withholding entire email chains.

The number of emails found to contain classified information has already surpassed 1,300.

Some 22 emails containing material demanding one of the highest levels of classification have been censored.

Clinton’s campaign immediately denounced the announcement, with a campaign official saying on Twitter that they adamantly “oppose the complete blocking of the release of these emails”.

The Associated Press said that the emails may have concerned drone strikes and so-called “special access programmes” or clandestine projects like government eavesdropping. Clinton’s opponents have said that her unsecured home server has put the country at risk and the Democratic politician, herself, has admitted that her decision to use a private email server at her NY home was a misjudgement.

“State has experienced some difficulty contacting some of the appropriate agency personnel since the snow storm and is still making arrangements with some of the receiving agencies for secure delivery of the documents”, the department lawyers wrote, emphasizing that these represent a small portion of the total remaining emails.

“This appears to be overclassification run amok”, Fallon said. Past classification questions, he said, “are being, and will be, handled separately by the State Department”. The department has so far released approximately 42,000 pages of Clinton’s correspondence. That would mean the last of the emails would not be released until the end of February – after the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, officials there told a federal judge this week. But they indicated that 7,000 of those pages required review by other government departments before they could be made public, so as to allow other agencies the opportunity to flag material they considered classified.

“I think it’s great”. “And as we have seen there is a lot… And your own network, NBC, last week reported that the inspector general from the intelligence community has been unfairly targeting Hillary Clinton, and escalating what should be a bureaucratic routine matter of overclassification, trying to turn it into a scandal in the heat of election season”.