Clinton got now-classified text on her email

On Friday, the State Department posted 296 Benghazi-related emails from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private server.
On Friday, the State Department posted 296 Benghazi-related emails from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private server.

WASHINGTON -- Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton received information on her private email account about the deadly attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Libya that was on Friday classified "secret" at the request of the FBI, according to documents released Friday.

The nearly 900 pages of her correspondence released by the State Department also contained several messages that were deemed sensitive but unclassified and detailed her daily schedule. Some contained information about the CIA that was censored in the documents released Friday because the government is barred from publicly disclosing it.

Taken together, the correspondence provides examples of material considered to be sensitive that Clinton, a candidate for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, received on the account run out of her home. She has said the private server had "numerous safeguards," but her decision while secretary of state to opt out of a State Department email account has become a political issue.

The Republican-led House committee investigating the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, has used the disclosures of her email usage to paint her as secretive and above standard scrutiny. Those attacks killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

Clinton, campaigning in New Hampshire, said Friday that she was aware the FBI now wanted some of the emails to be classified, "but that doesn't change the fact all of the information in the emails was handled appropriately."

Asked if she was concerned that it was on a private server, she replied, "No."

State Department spokesman Marie Harf said: "It was not classified at the time. The occurrence of subsequent upgrade does not mean anyone did anything wrong."

It's not clear whether Clinton's home computer system used encryption software to communicate securely with government email services. That would have protected her communications from the prying eyes of foreign spies, hackers or others on the Internet.

Last year, Clinton gave the State Department 55,000 pages of emails that she said pertained to her work as secretary of state that were sent from her personal email address. Only messages related to the 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, were released by the department Friday. The 296 emails had already been turned over to the House Benghazi committee.

A Nov. 18, 2012, message about arrests in Libya was not classified at the time, meaning no laws were violated, but was upgraded from "unclassified" to "secret" on Friday at the request of the FBI.

Twenty-three words were redacted from the message, which detailed reports of arrests in Libya of people who might have connections to the attack, Harf said. The redacted portion appears to relate to people who provided information about the alleged suspects to the Libyans.

No other redactions were made to the collection of Benghazi-related emails for classification reasons, officials said. They added that the Justice Department had not raised classification concerns about the now-redacted 1½ lines in the Nov. 18 email when the documents were turned over to the Benghazi committee. The committee retains an unredacted copy of the email, the officials said.

Committee chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said the released emails were incomplete, adding that it "strains credibility" to view them as a thorough record of Clinton's tenure. Gowdy and others contend that Clinton could have concealed some emails from her tenure as secretary of state since they were housed on a private server.

Clinton also appeared to send and receive protected information about the CIA, which was withheld Friday because the State Department said federal law prevented its disclosure. The department did not offer a detailed description of what it was withholding, such as a name or other sensitive information.

A number of the messages were marked with codes indicating that the information had been censored for reasons related to the U.S. intelligence community, law enforcement or personal privacy -- a process that happened after they'd already been circulated through Clinton's home server.

Much of the correspondence concerned the mundane matters of high-level government service, news clippings, speech drafts and coordination of calls with other top officials.

There also are repeated warnings of the unrest in Libya, though Clinton has said she was never personally involved in questions of security in Benghazi before the attack.

One message describes a one-day trip by Stevens in March 2011 to "get a sense of the situation on the ground" and prepare for a 30-day stay in the future. A request for Defense Department support was made, the email adds, but no approval had yet been received. Stevens was killed in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.

As early as April 2011, Clinton was forwarded a message sent to her staff that the situation in the country had worsened to the point "where Stevens is considering departure from Benghazi," The email was marked "Importance: High."

Information for this article was contributed by Matthew Daly, Stephen Braun, Eileen Sullivan and Ken Thomas of The Associated Press.

A Section on 05/23/2015

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