A new batch of e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private server may spell further trouble for the Democratic frontrunner, as State Department officials have reportedly found more classified information in the messages.
“State found about another 150 Clinton e-mails with classified information” in the new tranche of messages set to be released later today, Fox News’s Ed Henry reports. Clinton, who used a private e-mail server and e-mail account exclusively during her tenure as secretary of state, claimed in March that she never sent or received classified information on the private account. As e-mails flagged for classified information have been uncovered, Clinton has adjusted that defense, saying that she never knowingly sent or received such information.
That defense covers the latest e-mails, according to the State Department. “The information we’ve upgraded was not marked classified at the time the e-mails were sent,” spokesman Mark Toner told reporters Monday.
State Department claims that certain e-mails were classified retroactively have been contradicted by the government watchdogs tasked with investigating Clinton’s use of a private server. “These e-mails contained classified information when they were generated and, according to [intelligence community] classification officials, the information remains classified today,” State Department inspector general Steve Linick and Intelligence Community inspector general I. Charles McCullough said in a joint statement on July 24.
#share#In any case, the e-mails alread released by the State Department have undermined even the defense that Clinton was unaware of the classified nature of some unmarked information, as a number of the messages contain information that no secretary of state could fail to recognize as classified, even it was unmarked. Reuters reports:
In the small fraction of e-mails made public so far, Reuters has found at least 30 e-mail threads from 2009, representing scores of individual e-mails, that include what the State Department’s own “Classified” stamps now identify as so-called ‘foreign government information.’ The U.S. government defines this as any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts.
This sort of information, which the department says Clinton both sent and received in her e-mails, is the only kind that must be “presumed” classified, in part to protect national security and the integrity of diplomatic interactions, according to U.S. regulations examined by Reuters.
The batch of more than 6,000 e-mails set for Monday release will be the largest so far.
— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.
Editor’s Note: This piece has been updated since its initial posting.