150 new Clinton emails contain classified info

Roughly 150 of 7,000 soon-to-be-released pages of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails contain information that is currently classified, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Monday.

{mosads}“We have upgraded a number of these,” Toner told reporters during the department’s daily briefing .

“We look at these emails and we upgrade them as necessary as we see fit,” he added. “We stand by our position that the information we upgraded was not marked classified at the time it was sent.”

The 9 p.m. Monday evening release — which will happen when most eyes are averted from the news — is not an effort to evade scrutiny, Toner maintained. Instead, it’s merely a function of the work involved in making sure that none of the emails contain information that should be redacted.

“It’s because we’re getting these emails back from, as I said, an interagency review,” he said. “We’re compiling them, we’re actually loading them online. … It just takes a long time.”

“The goal is we do a thorough scrub on whether these need to be redacted,” Toner added.

The department’s release of the 7,000 new pages means that the government will have released 25 percent of Clinton’s entire email traffic, Toner said. The department is under a court-mandated deadline to release its full collection of 55,000 pages of Clinton emails by Jan. 29, 2016.

Clinton has been under intensifying scrutiny over her email use, as well as the revelations that dozens of her messages may have included information that should have been classified.

Both Clinton’s presidential campaign and the State Department have maintained that no information was ever marked as classified or should have been marked as classified at the time it was sent. The inspector general for the nation’s 17 federal intelligence agencies, however, has disagreed, and said that some of the emails contained information that should have been protected from the moment they were sent.  

The fallout from the revelations has created a major headache for Clinton’s White House campaign, which has struggled to respond.