The number of emails containing classified information that went through Hillary Clinton’s private server has grown to 60, according to the State Department. And that number is likely to grow as the investigation plows through the 30,000 emails Clinton didn’t delete.
Washington Times:
While media coverage has focused on a half-dozen of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s personal emails containing sensitive intelligence, the total number of her private emails identified by an ongoing State Department review as having contained classified data has ballooned to 60, officials told The Washington Times.
That figure is current through the end of July and is likely to grow as officials wade through a total of 30,000 work-related emails that passed through her personal email server, officials said. The process is expected to take months.
The 60 emails are among those that have been reviewed and cleared for release under the Freedom of Information Act as part of a open-records lawsuit. Some of the emails have multiple redactions for classified information.
Among the first 60 flagged emails, nearly all contained classified secrets at the lowest level of “confidential” and one contained information at the intermediate level of “secret,” officials told the Times.
Those 60 emails do not include two emails identified in recent days by Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III as containing “top-secret” information possibly derived from Pentagon satellites, drones or intercepts, which is some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets.
State officials and the intelligence community are working to resolve questions about those and other emails with possible classified information, a process that isn’t likely to be completed until January.
That will be right around the time Mrs. Clinton is slated to face voters in the Iowa caucuses in her bid for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.
Of course, it doesn’t matter whether they’re marked “confidential, “secret,” or “top secret” — they shouldn’t have been stored on a private server. But you can bet Clinton apologists will spin the emails as inconsequential because of the lower classifications and therefore, nothing worth getting all worked up about.
Sure — except that’s not what the law says.
And among the most abject apologists for Clinton are her former colleagues at the State Department:
The State Department is taking the line of Hillary Clinton’s that material in her personal email server was not classified at the time, and State is not accepting the intelligence inspector general’s determination that some information was top secret.
“None of them were classified at the time,” Mark C. Toner, State’s deputy spokesman, told reporters this week.
The assertion flies directly in the face of findings by both the State Department and Intelligence Community inspectors general who concluded that, while the material may not have been stamped as classified, Mrs. Clinton’s server held data that was classified then.
“We’re looking at, we’re trying to clarify their [intelligence community] findings and trying to resolve whether we think they need to be classified,” Mr. Toner said.
State is also refusing to accept the intelligence IG’s finding that some emails in a limited sample of Mrs. Clinton’s 30,000 delivered to State contained top secret material. The IG said it was specially compartmentalized to signify it pertained to communications intercepts and to military satellite imagery and, or, intercepts.
Said Mr. Toner on Wednesday “We have not seen anything at the TS [top secret] level yet.”
Perhaps if you took your head out of your tush, you might get a glimpse of Clinton’s wrongdoing.
