Final Clinton emails coming today
By Julian Hattem, The Hill, Feb. 29, 2016
The State Department will release the final batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails on Monday, some 10 months after the process began.
The release comes just ahead of 11 “Super Tuesday” contests, which Clinton hopes will propel her to a commanding lead over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential race.
Clinton’s campaign has tried to shake off the email controversy, but the monthly releases have fueled fresh headlines about her exclusive use of a private email account while serving as secretary of State.
With the releases now nearing an end, Republicans have seized on the fact that more than 1,800 emails from her machine were eventually classified.
“What we’ve learned in this discovery is that Hillary Clinton trafficked in sensitive information over her unclassified — and, by the way, private — email system,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the former head of the House Oversight Committee, told The Hill on Friday.
Clinton’s presidential campaign and the State Department have both disputed that the emails were classified at the time they were sent. Much of the information in them was classified retroactively, they say.
But the drips and drabs of information from various emails have carried the whiff of wrongdoing for Clinton.
One 2011 email released in January, for instance, seemed to show that Clinton ordered an aide to remove classification markings from a list of talking points and send it through a “nonsecure” channel.
Clinton subsequently insisted that no classified information was sent through unsecure means, but Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) released a statement calling the disclosure “disturbing.”
The State Department began releasing the roughly 55,000 pages of Clinton’s emails in May, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from Vice News journalist Jason Leopold.
On a monthly basis since then, the department released thousands of pages of emails for public review.
Read more here.
