http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/265114-in-surprise-release-state-dept-to-dump-thousands-of-clinton-emails By Julian Hattem - 01/07/16 03:39 PM EST
The State Department will release 2,900 pages of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails on Thursday, after failing to meet a court-ordered deadline last week.
Thursday’s document dump is likely to be the second-to-last release of Clinton’s emails by the State Department, which has been ordered by a court to have the full 55,000 pages of emails to the public by the end of the month.
Forty-five of the emails in Thursday evening’s release have been deemed classified at some level, department spokesman John Kirby said, bringing the total number of emails with now-classified information up to 1,319. At least one of the new emails has been upgraded to a level higher than “confidential.”
Last week’s dump, which came on New Year’s Eve, fell short of a court’s mandate to release 82 percent of the supposedly work-related emails. Thursday’s release will bring the State Department up to that benchmark, Kirby promised.
“In just a few short days, we’ve been able now to catch up to the 82 percent that we were responsible for,” Kirby told reporters on Thursday. “We’ll continue to do the best we can moving forward.”
Combing through the monthly releases of thousands of Clinton’s emails has become a regular habit for journalists and political operatives throughout Washington. The majority of the emails tend to deal with trivial matters such as television shows and meeting schedules, but they have occasionally offered insight into the lives of Clinton and her top aides.
Some have been more revealing, however, with tidbits of information about diplomatic engagements and other government activities.
National security experts worry about the presence of hundreds of classified emails that passed through Clinton’s personal, seemingly unsecured server. That information may have been vulnerable to hackers, analysts warn.
The State Department and Clinton’s presidential campaign have both insisted that nothing that passed through Clinton’s email inbox was classified at the time it was sent. Instead, they maintain that the information was only classified after the fact.
Clinton's exclusive use of a personal email address and private server throughout her tenure as the nation's top diplomat has continued to dog her presidential campaign. Many Democrats have dismissed the issue, but Republicans insist that it is a symptom of Clinton's ambitions to flout the rules.
