Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign said Wednesday that newly released emails indicate the former secretary of state was correct when she said none of her emails that contained potentially classified information were marked that way at the time they were sent or received.
Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon told reporters that she was a “passive recipient of unwitting information that subsequently became classified.”
Clinton aides sent two emails, now identified as containing classified information, that triggered an FBI investigation into the adequacy of State Department cybersecurity, Fox News reported Wednesday.
The State Department and the Intelligence Community differ on whether the information in the emails were classified. Fallon said the emails merely highlight that dispute and the over-classification in some instances.
“It says more about the bent toward secrecy in [some quarters of] government than Hillary Clinton's email practices,” he says.
One email contained classified military intelligence information and the other secret information about the 2012 fatal attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, the network said.
They were among four emails flagged by two inspectors general recently as containing classified information, ratcheting up scrutiny on Clinton’s use of a private email service while heading the State Department from 2009 to 2013, a spokesman for Clinton’s presidential campaign told reporters.
Neither, however, was among the two emails identified by the internal watchdogs as classified Top Secret, a high level of security that requires especially careful treatment.
The State Department turned both of the newly disclosed emails over to the House select committee investigating the Benghazi attack weeks ago, Fox reported.
Clinton has attempted to downplay the scrutiny as mere partisan attacks, but questions about her judgment and motive for setting up a private server in her Chappaqua house in 2009 continue to dog her.
Seeking to halt further damage, Clinton announced Tuesday that she would turn over the server to the Justice Department after months of resistance.
"In order to be as cooperative as possible, we have turned over the server," Clinton told reporters Tuesday. "They can do whatever they want to with the server to figure out what’s there and what’s not there. That’s for the people investigating it to try to figure out."
But she said she did not know if her server had been wiped clean of data.
"What, like with a cloth or something?" she asked. “I don’t know how it works at all.”
Anita Kumar: 202-383-6017, @anitakumar01
Greg Gordon: 202-383-0005, @greggordon2
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