The Obama administration is increasingly finding classified information in former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails, declaring secret material in nearly 3 percent of the batch released late Monday night.
That is up from just 1.7 percent of the emails in the previous releases and raises questions about whether the new set of emails is more troublesome or whether the administration is being more strict after repeated warnings by watchdogs that Mrs. Clinton’s messages contain matters that should not be made public.
All told, the government redacted parts of at least 125 messages because of secrecy out of 4,348 emails released Monday, as the State Department rushes to comply with a judge’s order that all 30,000 of Mrs. Clinton’s messages from her time as secretary be made public.
The latest release is already proving to be awkward for Mrs. Clinton, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.
“This is a very big deal,” Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump said in a Twitter message.
The latest batch still centers on Mrs. Clinton’s early years in office in 2009 and 2010, and details her communications with top personal aides and world leaders. Her political opponents are scouring the data to try to get more insight into her policy stances and actions while she was the top U.S. diplomat.
SEE ALSO: Hillary Clinton bows to left, takes swipe at Wall Street
More pointedly, all sides will be scrutinizing the redactions of classified email to try to gauge what types of secret information she was handling on her email server, which she kept at her home in New York, rather than relying on the secure state.gov system that officials said she should have been using to comply with open-records laws and to maintain security.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner insisted that none of the information in Mrs. Clinton’s latest batch of emails was marked classified at the time it was sent or received by her.
He said all the classifications have been made in the past month as officials review the messages for release.
“That’s our estimation right now,” he said. “Our goal is to look at this stuff, look at these emails, make a decision on whether we redact, upgrade the classification, and then publish them.”
He declined to issue a ruling as to whether the administration thinks Mrs. Clinton followed the law in handling classified information at the time.
“I’m just not going to answer that question. It’s not our goal; it’s not our function,” he said.
The latest batch of classified emails is in addition to more than 60 messages in the previous releases that have redacted secret information, marked in the documents as “Class: Confidential.”
That works out to classified information in about 1.7 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s previous messages, compared with 2.8 percent now.
What that rate means is in the eye of the beholder, said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist for Potomac Research Group, an independent polling and consulting firm in Washington.
“Her supporters will say she had trivial amount of classified information; her detractors will say she may have violated the law,” he said. “One thing appears certain: This saga will drag on and on, further damaging her presidential prospects.”
The department was put on notice this summer after an initial release contained information that the inspector general for the State Department and the inspector general for the intelligence community said should have been redacted. That information remains in public.
But chastened by that warning, the State Department began to run all questionable Clinton emails by five different security agencies.
Mrs. Clinton said she used her own server and email address because it was more convenient to set up a central one for both personal and business use.
Federal law required that any official business on nongovernmental accounts be forwarded to an official account so it could be stored for archival purposes, but Mrs. Clinton did not do that until late last year, nearly two years after she left office, and only after she was prodded by the committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.
She has said she now wants all the emails to be made public. She initially said she did not traffic in classified material from the account, but has since clarified that she meant none of the information was classified at the time.
She turned over about 30,000 emails in paper form in December, forcing the State Department to spend months processing them to get them back into a digital format. Her attorney said she then discarded 32,000 messages she deemed personal that were sent from the same account, then wiped the server clean.
Some of the information marked classified in the new batch is material gathered from interactions with foreign governments, while other times Mrs. Clinton and her aides are discussing information from the Defense Department.
One of the messages was a sensitive information as a readout of a March 2010 briefing to top U.S. diplomats by Saeb Erekat, the chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Steering and Monitoring Committee, Fatah Central Committee member Azzam al-Ahmed and other Palestinians in Cairo.
The readout of the briefing was emailed with the subject line “State of Play” on March 2, 2010, at 4:06 p.m. by Daniel Rubinstein, the U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem at the time, to several senior State Department officials, including Mara Rudman, who was deputy envoy and chief of staff to the U.S. Special Envoy for Middle East Peace.
Ms. Rudman forwarded the email at 4:10 p.m. to top Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Jacob Sullivan. Ms. Abedin and Mr. Sullivan forwarded it to Mrs. Clinton at 5:08 p.m. and 5:16 p.m., respectively.
Other material in the emails is more evocative of Mrs. Clinton’s style as secretary, including several exchanges in which she wonders whether a teleprompter would be available. She’s reluctantly informed by an aide that there won’t be one speech at the United Nations.
In another message Mrs. Clinton impressed her staff by her familiarity with the latest science, catching a tidbit about the effectiveness of vitamin A in nutrition in the developing world. “You were right about Vitamin A, no surprise (although a bit surprising that none of the experts noticed it),” speechwriter Megan Rooney wrote her.
Of the new messages, 764 are from Huma Abedin, Mrs. Clinton’s top personal aide, whose role at the department has come under scrutiny after it was revealed that she also held a job with an outside consultant at the same time. A top congressional investigator has demanded an explanation of the unique arrangement.
Of the classified emails in Thursday’s batch, 27 were from Ms. Abedin, who also used Mrs. Clinton’s email system and who also has been asked to turn over her own official government emails she took with her when she left the department.
Also in the new batch of emails were messages from Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton associate whom the Obama administration forbade her hiring at the department, but who continued to send her advice and comments.
One message he titled “H: Yes, there is a vast right wing conspiracy. Sid” — a reference to Mrs. Clinton’s complaint as first lady that conservatives were out to get her and her husband.
The FBI has opened an investigation into whether classified information was mishandled, and has taken charge of the email server and of flash-drive storage devices that contained the emails in electronic form, and which were held by Mrs. Clinton’s attorney as a backup.
The controversy has taken a toll on Mrs. Clinton’s presidential run as voters increasingly doubt her honesty and integrity.
A Quinnipiac University poll last week found that the top three words voters use to describe her are “liar,” “dishonest” and “untrustworthy.”
A majority of Americans — 58 percent — said Mrs. Clinton “knowing lied” in March when she claimed that she never had classified material on her private email service, according to a recent Fox News poll.
While she remains the odds-on favorite to win the nomination, the scandal has eaten away at her poll numbers nationally and in early-voting states and helped liberal rival Sen. Bernard Sanders close in on her in Iowa and surge past her in New Hampshire.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.