Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton received information on her private email account about the deadly attack on US diplomatic facilities in Benghazi that was later classified “secret” at the request of the FBI, underscoring lingering questions about how responsibly she handled sensitive information on a home server.
The nearly 900 pages of her correspondence released on Friday are only a sliver of the more than 55,000 pages of emails Clinton — the leading 2016 Democratic presidential candidate — has turned over to the State Department, which had its plan to release them next January rejected this week by a federal judge.
Instead, the judge ordered the agency to conduct a “rolling production” of the records. Along with a Republican-led House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks, the slow drip of emails will likely keep the issue of how Clinton used a personal email account while serving as the nation’s top diplomat alive indefinitely.
Republican Committee chairman Trey Gowdy said that the released emails were incomplete, adding that it “strains credibility” to view them as a thorough record of Clinton’s tenure.
The prospect for political complication in Clinton’s choice to use a personal email account, rather than one issued by the government, was evident in the messages released on Friday. They included several that were deemed sensitive but unclassified, contained details about her daily schedule and held information — censored in the documents as released — about the CIA that the government is barred from publicly disclosing.
Taken together, the correspondence provides examples of material considered to be sensitive that Clinton received on the account run out of her home. She has said the private server had “numerous safeguards”. Campaigning in New Hampshire, Clinton said on Friday she was aware that the FBI now wanted some of the email to be classified, “but that doesn’t change the fact all of the information in the emails was handled appropriately”. Asked if she was concerned it was on a private server, she replied, “No”. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said, “It was not classified at the time. The occurrence of subsequent upgrade does not mean anyone did anything wrong.”