FBI director: Clinton emails were marked as classified at the time

FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday said some of the information on Hillary Clinton’s private email server was marked as classified and ought to have been treated as such at the time it was sent, undermining a key claim of the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate’s.

A total of 113 emails contained information that federal agencies say was sensitive at the time it was sent or received, Comey told reporters.

And a small but undisclosed number of emails were marked as such.

{mosads}“A very small number of the emails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information,” Comey said.

The twin revelations torpedo a key claim of the former secretary of State, who has pleaded ignorance about the presence of classified information on her email setup.

Clinton’s position on the server has steadily evolved from March 2015, when she insisted there was not any classified information of any type on her machine.

Last July, she maintained at a campaign stop that she “never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received.”

And on Tuesday, the campaign continued to claim that “[n]o information in Clinton’s emails was marked classified at the time she sent or received them.”

Comey told reporters on Tuesday that three of the 113 emails containing information classified at the time were among the “several thousand” work-related messages Clinton deleted in 2014, alleging they were strictly personal.

Twenty-two emails in eight different chains of messages were marked as top secret, the highest classification level.

Even if Clinton didn’t see the classification markings, the FBI head said, she ought to have treated the information more carefully.

“Even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it,” he said.

“There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation,” he said. 

Despite the revelations, Comey said on Tuesday that the FBI did not find sufficient evidence to warrant federal charges against Clinton for mishandling classified information.