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Latest batch of Clinton emails may contain classified intel
It all depends on how you define "classified."
The State Department announced on Monday that it will release an email from former-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server that, according to members of the intelligence community, may contain classified information. The email is part of a nearly 8,000-page document dump scheduled for Monday. The State Department has already unveiled around 30,000 pages (of an estimated 54,000) since the scandal erupted in March.
The email in question, sent November 27th, 2010, is one of four that Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III and State Department Inspector General Steve Linick deemed "classified" earlier this summer. The State Department did not expound on the subject of the email or the nature of the classified materials it reportedly contains.
"These emails were not retroactively classified by the State Department; rather these emails contained classified information when they were generated and, according to IC classification officials, that information remains classified today," McCullough and Linick wrote in a July 23 statement. "This classified information should never have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system." McCullough then argued in August that two of those four emails contained "Top Secret" intelligence. What's more, intelligence community classification experts "judged that they contained classified State Department information when originated," McCullough wrote in a follow-up memo.
The State Department, however, disputes the validity of these secrecy classifications and has suggested that its employees may have garnered the information in question through means not involving classified intelligence reports. Either way, the State Department has beseeched Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Jr. for a ruling. The email in question is likely one of those. The remaining 8,000 or so documents will consist of emails from 2012 through the end of Clinton's stint as Secretary of State.
[Image Credit: Getty]
