The Republican National Committee released a new ad mocking Hillary Clinton's launch of a Snapchat account amidst her private email controversy. The ad plays on her widely panned joke about liking Snapchat because it self-deletes messages.
"You may have seen that I have recently launched a Snapchat account. I love it," Clinton said at an event in Iowa. "Those messages disappear all by themselves."
The joke is a reference to the ongoing FBI investigation into Clinton's use of private e-mail for government purposes. The agency is attempting to determine whether Clinton handled classified information from a private server.
The New York Times reports,
This week, the inspector general of the nation’s intelligence agencies, I. Charles McCullough III, informed members of Congress that Mrs. Clinton had "top secret" information, the highest classification of government intelligence, in her account.
Some of that information, according to a memorandum the inspector general sent to the heads of the Senate and House intelligence and judiciary committees, may have come from a program called Talent Keyhole, which relies on satellite intercepts of conversations or imagery data. The program involves some of the most secure information in the intelligence agencies’ computer systems.
Specifically, the inspector general told members of Congress that two emails should have been classified as top secret, with one of them designated "TOP SECRET//SI//TK/NOFORN." Officials familiar with the nomenclature said that "SI" stood for "special intelligence," usually indicating an intercepted communication, and that "TK" was routinely used as an abbreviation for Talent Keyhole, showing that the communication or an image was obtained from a satellite.
Attached to the memo — which was publicly released by Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee — were copies of two of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that Mr. McCullough said contained classified information. Those emails were not released publicly.
The State Department has questioned whether the determination by Mr. McCullough is correct. Nevertheless, the findings are consistent with the view of some federal officials that the State Department is not rigorous enough in handling classified national security information.