http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/261530-feds-release-largest-batch-of-clinton-emailsBy Julian Hattem - 11/30/15 04:06 PM EST
The State Department released its largest batch yet of Hillary Clinton’s emails on Monday, part of a gradual process to put all of the messages that she claimed were work-related out for the public to see.
The department released 7,800 pages of the former secretary of State's emails, including one email that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had originally flagged as potentially containing classified information before deciding it did not contain intelligence agency information.
Monday's document dump was the seventh of the process.
Two-thirds of Clinton’s work-related emails have now been made public, the State Department said. There will be two more major releases of the Democratic presidential front-runner’s messages: at the end of December and in late January.
The disclosures are a result of a court order earlier this year, which demanded that the full 55,000 pages of Clinton’s work-related emails be released by late January. The State Department is on pace to meet that timetable, it said Monday.
“Meeting this goal is a testament to our commitment to releasing to the public these emails as expeditiously as possible,” State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau told reporters.
Monday’s release came hours after reports emerged that Clinton spent time with dozens of supporters of the Democratic Party and her family’s nonprofit group while serving in the State Department, angering GOP critics.
According to The Associated Press, Clinton’s calendars showed that she spoke with nearly 100 corporate executives, donors and political supporters during her four years in office.
To Republicans, the report highlighted the blurred lines between Clinton’s official, campaign and charitable work, and reinforced the skepticism caused by her use of a private server.
“When she wasn’t busy covering up her secret email server, Hillary Clinton set a new standard for blatantly ignoring conflicts of interest while serving as secretary of State,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. “We cannot trust someone who has proven she is for sale to the highest bidder.”
Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email setup throughout her tenure as secretary of State has haunted her presidential campaign.
Fellow Democrats have begun openly griping about the focus on Clinton’s emails from the media and Republicans, and polling consistently indicates that the related perception of impropriety could dog her during the general election.
Critics, including prominent lawmakers on Capitol Hill, have worried that Clinton’s use of a personal email address and private server housed in her New York home could have made American secrets vulnerable to hackers and allowed her to keep potentially embarrassing information secret.
Nearly 1,000 of Clinton’s messages have been marked as classified — including 328 in the currrent batch — though both the State Department and Clinton’s presidential campaign insist that nothing was marked as classified at the time it was sent or received by Clinton. Critics question that claim, alleging that the presence of classified information should have been obvious to the nation’s top diplomat.
One email in the new batch has been marked as “secret” — a middle level of classification — and was marked for containing information about U.S. foreign relations. The email was about the investigation into the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, following on the arrest of suspects “who may” have some connection to the attack.
The inspector general for the nation’s intelligence agencies has said that at least two emails found on Clinton’s server contained “top secret” information, the highest possible category of classification.
The watchdog initially flagged two other emails as being potentially confidential. After reviewing them, however, it decided that they did not contain information from the nation’s intelligence agencies and were handed back to the State Department for it to decide how to proceed.
One of those emails, from November 2010, was included in Monday’s release. None of the information was “upgraded” to any level of classification, State Department spokeswoman Trudeau claimed.
The email concerned a discussion with New York Times reporter Scott Shane about diplomatic cables.
Many of Clinton’s emails released on Monday date from her finals months in office, in 2012 and 2013.
During a hearing held by the House Select Committee on Benghazi last month, Clinton claimed that she “did not conduct most of the business” she did at the State Department via email.
The files being released by the State Department account for roughly half of all the emails sent or received through Clinton’s personal email address. Tens of thousands of pages of emails Clinton deemed personal have been deleted, she said.
