The State Department released 7,000 pages of emails from former Secretary Hillary Clinton late on Friday, including 125 that had been redacted for containing classified information.
The release of the 4,300 messages came as part of a court order that demanded the department release some of Clinton’s emails every month and assure that the full 55,000-page cache would be made public by Jan. 29, 2016.
{mosads}The fact that 125 of the emails had been flagged for containing classified information is sure to deepen the scrutiny surrounding her mail use. The private email setup Clinton used while in office has dogged her campaign, and concerns have only grown surrounding the allegation that some emails included classified information.
Department spokesman Mark Toner said in a statement that the information redacted from Clinton’s emails was not classified at the time but had instead been deemed classified as time passed.
“The information we have upgraded today was not marked classified at the time the emails were sent,” he said. “They have been subsequently upgraded.”
“It is routine to upgrade information to classified status during the [Freedom of Information Act] process,” he added. “This happens frequently — several times a month. We are identifying documents that need to be classified today prior to public release.”
The department had said earlier in the day that approximately 150 emails contained classified information.
The issue has turned into a massive political headache for Clinton and her front-running Democratic presidential campaign. In response, she has tried to shake up her campaign and move the conversation away from the emails and toward her Republican critics.
Republicans aren’t letting up, however.
On Monday, Republican front-runner Donald Trump called the ongoing troubles a “very big deal.”
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus released a statement.
“These new emails show Hillary Clinton exposed even more classified information on her secret server than previously known,” Priebus said. “On hundreds of occasions, Hillary Clinton’s reckless attempt to skirt transparency laws put sensitive information and our national security at risk. With the FBI continuing to investigate, Hillary Clinton’s growing email scandal shows she cannot be trusted with the White House.”
The new documents stretch from December 2009 to December 2010 and cover a wide swath of Clinton’s duties as the nation’s top diplomat.
Some of the messages that have been subsequently classified for national security reasons include a May 2010, correspondence about a speech relating to Iran, Middle East peace talks and the Futenma military base in Japan.
In one unclassified email from June 2010, Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal passed along a “confidential report” about the ongoing crisis in Kyrgyzstan, which had recently undergone a revolution.
The revolt was “an opportunity for joint U.S.-Russian action,” Blumenthal said.
Including the previous bunches of emails that the State Department has released on a monthly basis since May, approximately 25 percent of the total contents of Clinton’s emails held by the department had been made public, Toner said.
— Updated at 10:20 p.m.