The latest batch of Hillary Clinton emails offered fresh insight into her schmoozing ways, her thoughts on the 2012 presidential race, and some sideline drama as the State Department and a watchdog for the intelligence community tangled on Monday over whether one of Clinton’s emails should have been considered classified.
State released nearly 8,000 more pages of messages from the personal account and server that Clinton used during her four-year tenure as secretary of state, including 328 that are now deemed classified, bringing the total number of messages partially withheld on that basis to 999, a State spokesman said.
All the messages designated as classified Monday were at the lowest tier, "Confidential," which is usually used for sensitive diplomatic communications.
The Democratic front-runner's presidential campaign has been overshadowed at times by the email scandal, but the controversy has abated some since Clinton delivered a strong performance during her October testimony before the House Benghazi committee. She has also benefited, at times, from disputes among government agencies about whether messages should now be deemed classified, which has allowed her campaign to point to the malleable nature of the classification system.
On Monday, the State Department released a WikiLeaks-related email from Clinton's personal account that official watchdogs for the intelligence community and the department flagged over the summer as appearing to contain classified information, according to a State Department spokeswoman.
The message was among four that Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III and State Department Inspector General Steve Linick flagged in July as classified after reviewing a sample of 40 emails from Clinton's account, State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau indicated at a daily briefing for reporters.
However, a spokeswoman for McCullough denied that the WikiLeaks email was among the four the watchdogs said contained sensitive intelligence community information. Instead, the message was one intelligence officials considered possibly classified under State's standards and urged State to take a close look at.
"ODNI and CIA classification experts judged the email as probably classified SECRET//NOFORN based on the State Department Classification Guide; However; they deferred to State Department for final adjudication," ICIG spokeswoman Andrea Williams said Monday. "So, we said from the start it’s State's call on classification."
A State spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.
Monday's document dump is the seventh public release of Clinton emails since she turned roughly 54,000 pages of messages over to her former agency in December after a top State Department official asked Clinton and three other former secretaries to provide copies of any official government records in their possession.
The emails released in the latest batch largely cover the secretary's final year in the Obama administration, including the 2012 presidential election and the lead-up to and the aftermath of her testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 2013, less than two weeks before she left office.
During the 2012 Republican primaries, Clinton emailed with longtime confidant Sid Blumenthal about the state of the GOP race, revealing some of her nicknames for the contenders.
"If Mittens can't beat Grinch in Florida," Clinton wrote, in reference to eventual nominee Mitt Romney and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, "there will be pressure on state Republican parties to reopen or liberalize ballot access especially in the caucuses, which as we know are creatures of the parties' extremes."
As the secretary testified in 2013 on the Benghazi attacks, she received no shortage of praise and encouragement from her allies, as well as a fair amount of sucking up.
Following her appearance before the Senate committee, Blumenthal shared a post from the blog Feministing titled "How to deal with a mansplainer starring Hillary Clinton in GIFs."
"H: FYI, best analysis so far of hearing. Sid," he wrote. "Loved them!" Clinton responded, to which Blumenthal added that his wife, Jackie, thought her glasses were "very stylish" and "attractive."
During the hearing, aides and friends took note of the volume of tweets praising Clinton's performance.
"Twitter is on fire...," adviser Minyon Moore wrote in an email to Clinton's chief of staff Cheryl Mills. "That beat down was an appropriate reaction."
"2016 --- she had better run and hide," Moore wrote in another, on a day where Clinton was grilled by Republican senators on the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi.
Following her testimony, Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state under Bill Clinton, shared a series of tweets showing the "Twitterverse abuzz."
"What did we do before twitter??" Clinton wrote, to which Talbott responded, "We thought & talked & were untired."
"Amen," Clinton wrote back.
The newly released emails show Clinton’s aides and outside advisers keeping close track of politics within President Barack Obama's White House, paying particular attention to events such as the ouster of National Security Adviser Jim Jones and the steady rise of Obama adviser Denis McDonough.
One email relayed to Clinton by Mills shows longtime Clinton adviser John Podesta slamming Obama political guru David Axelrod for “caving in” to GOP demands on taxes after Democrats took at a drubbing at the polls in November 2010.
“At least David has his principles in tact [sic] like he won’t be for small things like school uniforms — only big things like totally caving in to right wing economics. Unbelievable,” Podesta wrote to a colleague at the Center for American Progress think tank, Neera Tanden, copying in Mills and Doug Band — a veteran aide to President Bill Clinton.
The latest emails also showcased Clinton's continued technical woes (following numerous run-ins with BlackBerrys and the fax machine).
In one exchange with senior adviser Philippe Reines, the secretary inquired about the channel number for Showtime so that she could watch "Homeland."
"You won't be surprised to hear I'm not sure," Clinton responded to Reines, who asked if she knew whether she had Comcast. Hours later, Reines followed up, "So, success?"
The WikiLeaks-related email that the State Department released on Monday was forwarded to Clinton by Mills, and contained back-and-forth between State and a New York Times reporter about the imminent release of parts of a vast collection of State Department cables leaked to WikiLeaks. In the exchange, Times reporter Scott Shane tells State spokesman P.J. Crowley what portions of the cables the newspaper is planning to withhold at State's request and what portions will be published over State's objections.
"We have redacted the Libya and China cables with vulnerable sources; we are not posting the Russian cable at all," Shane wrote. "However, we are naming MbZ, AbZ and King Hamad; we are running Mr. Ruggiero's name; and we are posting the Humint collection cable."
Crowley added a comment as he relayed the Times's response to Clinton's top aides. That comment was deleted from the copy made public Monday, apparently as internal government deliberations. Nothing in the email is marked classified.
"The document went through our normal Freedom of Information Act review process along with the other documents being processed for our monthly releases of former Secretary Clinton’s emails," Trudeau said Monday. "State did not upgrade [to classified] any information in this document.”
In a statement in July, McCullough and Linick had said four of 40 emails reviewed by the intelligence community contained intelligence information considered classified.
"These emails were not retroactively classified by the State Department; rather these emails contained classified information when they were generated and, according to IC classification officials, that information remains classified today," McCullough and Linick said in a July 24 press statement. "This classified information should never have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system."
However, Williams said Monday that the newly-released WikiLeaks email was not among the four emails discussed in the July statement.
In a follow-up memo to lawmakers the next month, McCullough said some emails from Clinton's account contained intelligence community information classified "Top Secret," with additional restrictions for signals intelligence and airborne or satellite surveillance. Two other emails reviewed by intelligence community classification experts who "judged that they contained classified State Department information when originated," McCullough wrote.
State Department spokespeople have said they disagree with the intelligence community's claims about the allegedly "Top Secret" emails and have suggested that State officials may have gleaned that information without consulting reports based on sensitive U.S. intelligence methods. State has asked the Office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Jr. to resolve the dispute. Those two messages are not among the ones set to be released Monday, officials said.
The findings in July about the four emails led McCullough to refer the issue to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a potential breach of secrecy of "counterintelligence" concern. The FBI subsequently asked Clinton's attorney to hand over a thumb drive containing copies of her emails and for a technology company hosting Clinton's server to turn the server over to investigators. The equipment went to the FBI in August.
POLITICO reported earlier this month that FBI agents involved in the inquiry recently interviewed a former high-ranking policy official at State and sought documents from another tech firm involved in Clinton's email set-up.
Clinton initially said that her email account contained no classified information. In recent months, she has stressed that she did not send any classified information and that no information she sent or received was marked classified.
About 850 pages of Clinton account messages relating to the Benghazi attacks and security issues in Libya were made public in May. Larger releases have taken place on the State Department's web site every month since then, following a judge's order setting targets aimed at completing release of the records by January.
Only four of the messages released earlier this year have been marked at the middle tier of classification, "Secret." One, classified at the request of the FBI, pertained to arrests possibly linked to the 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi. Two others appear to relate to diplomatic talks in Turkey about Iran's nuclear program. The fourth was a summary of a 2008 Mideast peace negotiating session. State classified that memo even though it was published in full by Al Jazeera in 2011.
Even if the State Department completes the release of the Clinton messages by January, the saga is likely to continue straight through the looming Democratic presidential primaries and even next November's election. Litigation is expected over the legal validity of deletions the State Department has made from the emails on the basis of national security, privacy and other grounds.
In addition, tens of thousands of emails from Clinton's top aides — sent both on public and private accounts — are the subject of pending Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits. Release of messages from those archives could go on for years.
