Some of Hillary Clinton’s emails are “too damaging” to national security to be released under any circumstances, Fox News reports.
On Friday, Fox reported that the intelligence agencies charged with reviewing Clinton’s emails before they are released won’t be releasing some of the emails because “the intelligence agencies are operating on the assumption there are more copies of the Clinton emails out there.” (RELATED: Rep. Issa: FBI ‘Would Like To Indict Both Huma [Abedin] And Hillary Clinton’)
As Fox News reported earlier in January, some of Clinton’s emails contained “special access programs” (SAP) intelligence, which is a classification level higher than “Top Secret.” (RELATED: Report: Emails At The Highest Classification Levels Found On Hillary’s Private Server)
In a January 14, memo, the inspector general of the intel community, Charles McCullough, wrote that his agency had discovered “several dozen” classified emails, as well as emails with “special access program” information. (RELATED: MSNBC: FBI’s Hillary Investigation ‘Far More Advanced’ Than Public Knows [VIDEO])
The Associated Press reports that Obama administration confirms that 22 emails contained the information deemed too sensitive to release. (RELATED: State Dept. Indicates Hillary’s Most ‘Complex’ Emails Have Yet To Be Released)
According to the Friday AP report, there were seven email chains, consisting of 37 pages that contained SAP level classified information. Those emails are being withheld in-full from release.
The State Department said their Diplomatic Security and Intelligence and Research bureaus are looking into the emails to find out if any of the information sent was classified at the time of transmission.
The Clinton campaign has long denied wrong doing, claiming to be victims of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to take Hillary down. (RELATED: Hillary’s Campaign Accuses Intel IG Of Coordinating With GOP On Damning Email Reports)
State Department spokesman John Kirby told the AP that the Freedom of Information Act request into Clinton’s emails was based upon “whether they need to be classified today.”
The questions about the emails past classification level, Kirby said, “are being, and will be, handled separately by the State Department.”
John Schindler, a national security columnist at The Observer, says that “any normal” government employee who had 22 Top Secret emails in their personal email account would be “frog-walked in literally no time.”
Needless to add, any normal USG employee whose personal email had 22 TS items "somehow" in it would be frog-walked in literally no time.
— John Schindler (@20committee) January 29, 2016
A statement from the Clinton campaign press secretary Brian Fallon stands by their earlier positions claiming, “We firmly oppose the complete blocking of the release of these emails. Since first providing her emails to the State Department more than one year ago, Hillary Clinton has urged that they be made available to the public. We feel no differently today.”
“After a process that has been dominated by bureaucratic infighting that has too often played out in public view, the loudest and leakiest participants in this interagency dispute have now prevailed in blocking any release of these emails,” Fallon said. “This flies in the face of the fact that these emails were unmarked at the time they were sent, and have been called ‘innocuous’ by certain intelligence officials. We understand that these emails were likely originated on the State Department’s unclassified system before they were ever shared with Secretary Clinton, and they have remained on the department’s unclassified system for years. And, in at least one case, the emails appear to involve information from a published news article.”
Going as far as expressing his desire to release the now-classified emails, Fallon said “This appears to be over-classification run amok… We will pursue all appropriate avenues to see that her emails are released in a manner consistent with her call last year.”
The developments in Clinton’s email scandal comes just days before the Iowa caucus on Monday, February 1.
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