One of the emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server released by the State Department Monday shows the former secretary of state checking with staffers about whether one of her emails contained classified information.
The message, first reported by ABC News, indicates that Clinton understood that emails not marked classified could still contain information that was classified. In order to brush off controversy surrounding her use of personal email, Clinton has repeatedly insisted that she never sent nor received information marked classified on her unsecured system.
"If it’s not classified or otherwise inappropriate, can you send to the NYTimes reporters who interviewed me today?" Clinton wrote in the April 2012 email to aides Jake Sullivan and Phillippe Reines, forwarding a message about the State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications.
Clinton checks with staff to see if a message on her email is classified. If not, she says, send to the @nytimes pic.twitter.com/sJTPAL5Rzw
— Justin Fishel (@JustinFishelABC) March 1, 2016
Sullivan ultimately assessed that the email was not classified or "inappropriate." It also was not updated with classified markings in the State Department’s latest release. Still, it suggests that Clinton knew that classified material could appear in emails not marked classified.
Critics have argued that Clinton’s use of unsecured email to conduct government business compromised national security.
The emails released by the agency Monday constituted the last of Clinton’s emails that it has been vetting and releasing to the public over the last 10 months. The State Department has released most of the approximately 30,000 work-related emails that Clinton turned over to the government after it was revealed a year ago that she exclusively used a private email account during her tenure. The emails sent to the State Department last year did not include about 30,000 messages from Clinton’s account that she and aides deemed personal and deleted.
The agency was forced to withhold 22 messages from release in January because they contain top secret information. The State Department has said that it is looking into whether those messages contained information that was classified at the time they originated on Clinton’s server.
While none of the messages in the final release were upgraded to a top secret classification, the State Department withheld two emails from release, including one that was a correspondence with President Obama.
The tally of Clinton emails upgraded to classified now stands at more than 2,000, though the State Department has maintained that the messages were not marked classified when they were sent from or received on Clinton’s email.