State Dept: 150 More Clinton Emails Contained Classified Information
Ahead of the State Department’s planned release of another batch of Hillary Clinton‘s emails later Monday night, a department spokesman told reporters that 150 of those messages contained classified information. The emails were not marked classified at the time they were sent or received.
“We look at these emails and we upgrade them as necessary as we see fit,” Mark Toner said Monday. “We stand by our position that the information we upgraded was not marked classified at the time it was sent.”
The entire batch will be released at 9:00 p.m. ET, but the State Department was able to confirm the number, as first reported by Fox’s Ed Henry, during the afternoon press briefing. Toner added that the entire process takes time because the review of Clinton’s emails is being conducted by multiple agencies. “The goal is that we do a thorough scrub on whether these need to be redacted,” he said.
Clinton turned over 55,000 pages of work-related emails to the State Department last December, while more than 30,000 personal emails were destroyed from her private server. The former secretary of state has been dogged by questions over whether she mishandled classified information, while maintaining that nothing she sent or received on her private email account was marked classified at the time.
Earlier this month, she turned over her private server, which was housed in Clinton’s New York home, to the FBI. She has said that in hindsight, it would have been better if she used separate accounts for work and personal correspondence.
Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has been losing ground in key early voting states, prompting many Democrats to worry that Clinton is not responding well enough to the email controversy. If Clinton continues to falter, Vice President Joe Biden could jump into the 2016 contest.
A Clinton campaign spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment on the new development.
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