State Department: Emails ‘Were Not Marked Classified At The Time That They Were Sent’
Just days before the all-important Iowa caucuses the U.S. State Department has announced it is not releasing 22 emails in seven separate threads because various government agencies now say they contain information in categories that are now “top secret.”
State Dept. spokesperson John Kirby in the video above told reporters this afternoon those emails “were not marked classified at the time that they were sent,” meaning the Clinton State Dept. had no reason to treat them differently than any other emails.Â
“The Obama administration confirmed for the first time Friday that Hillary Clinton’s unsecured home server contained closely guarded government secrets, censoring 22 emails with material requiring one of the highest levels of classification,” the AP reports. “The documents are being upgraded at the request of the intelligence community because they contain a category of top secret information,” Kirby told the AP.
“We firmly oppose the complete blocking of the release of these emails,” Clinton campaign spokesman Brain Fallon said in a statement, the AP reports, adding he calls it “overclassification run amok.”
“Since first providing her emails to the State Department more than one year ago, Hillary Clinton has urged that they be made available to the public. We feel no differently today.”
Fallon accused the “loudest and leakiest participants” in a process of bureaucratic infighting for withholding the exchanges. The documents, he said, originated in the State Department’s unclassified system long before they ever reached Clinton, and “in at least one case, the emails appear to involve information from a published news article.”
Speaking with MSNC Friday afternoon (video above), Fallon insists the new classification of “top secret” is in hindsight by government agencies “who have hijacked the process that’s been taking place for the last several months.”
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Image: Screenshot via MSNBC