The State Department publicly released a 900-page document containing a batch of the e-mails Hilary Clinton had received on her private e-mail account during her tenure as secretary of state.
According to the document, the Presidential hopeful received sensitive information on the terrorist attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi three years ago.
The document also contained sensitive information on Ms. Clinton’s daily schedule during that time and the CIA’s activity. However, data on the CIA were censored. This batch of correspondence clearly shows that the former secretary of state used her private e-mail account hosted on a private server located at her home for work-related e-mails.
Because she declined to use her e-mail provided by the State Department while in office, she was harshly criticized by the committee that had investigated the Benghazi attacks. She was deemed secretive and an opponent to government transparency.
On Friday, Clinton disclosed that the FBI currently seeks to classify some of her correspondence. Yet, she said that that didn’t mean that she hadn’t handle the work-related data from her e-mails “appropriately.”
When a reporter asked if she was troubled because the e-mails were hosted on her private server she bluntly replied, “No.”
On Friday a spokesperson from the State Department said that the information contained in her Beghazi-related e-mails was not classified at that time. But any upgrade from unclassified to secret didn’t mean that “anyone did anything wrong,” the State Department’s spokesperson added.
Although critics said that Clinton’s behavior compromised national security by granting easy access to classified information to foreign spies or hackers, Clinton may have used encryption software to communicate from her home computer.
In 2014, Clinton handed more than 50,000 pages of correspondence over to the State department including 296 e-mails containing info on the 2012 Benghazi attacks.
On Friday, the department made public only the e-mails related to the attacks that led to the death of three Americans and the U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens. The e-mails were sent to the Benghazi committee long before that moment.
However, on Friday the FBI asked that a piece of unclassified information from Nov. 18, 2012 to be deemed “secret” because it could negatively impact national security. The information on the arrests of some suspects in the attacks was censored. That included the names of the people who helped authorities make the arrests.
The rest of the publicly released document was not censored. However, the Benghazi committee received an “unredacted copy” of the correspondence.
Image Source: We Meant Well (blog)