State Department releases thousands of Clinton emails, 125 contain classified information

The State Department released thousands of pages of Hillary Clinton's emails Monday night that a department spokesman said contained 125 messages with material now considered classified.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the emails in question were "subsequently upgraded" to classified. He stressed that none of the emails was considered classified at the time.

However, the sheer number of emails that have been redacted stands as the latest example of how much sensitive material was contained in Clinton's email transactions. The FBI is conducting an investigation into whether classified information that passed through Clinton's so-called "homebrew" server was mishandled. Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. 

The emails with redacted sections discussed global issues in countries from Haiti to China to Sudan.

One April 2010 email from Clinton's top aide Huma Abedin containing a report from then-ambassador to China Jon Huntsman was redacted entirely, while a message from that September about "calls" Clinton said she was willing to make regarding trilateral talks over Sudan was likewise blacked out.

Other classified emails contain discussions about a potential presidential election in Haiti, meetings between U.S. and Cuban officials regarding aid to Haiti in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in that country, discussions of a conversation between the Russian and American ambassadors to the United Nations, and elections for the presidency of the International Development Bank, 

In all, the State Department said that 7,121 pages of emails from the former secretary of state's personal email server had been made public -- the largest such release to date.

"We're producing more documents this month than we have produced in the previous three releases," Toner had said earlier Monday.

The department has repeatedly clashed with the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) over which information in Clinton's emails was classified at the time it was sent. ICIG Charles McCullough has told members of Congress that hundreds of classified or potentially classified messages existed on the server.

Posted in: Politic