In a political setback for Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton just two days before the Iowa caucuses, the Obama administration has acknowledged for the first time that “top secret” information has been found in 22 of her emails that passed through a private server she used during her tenure as Secretary of State.
The State Department, which has been poring over the emails for months and releasing in batches all those not containing classified information, said on Friday that the 22 emails, across seven email chains, will not be made public, effectively censoring 37 pages of emails from Clinton’s private server that has been the subject of a major controversy for months.
State Department spokesman John Kirby explained that the emails in question were not marked classified at the time they were sent, but these are now “being upgraded at the request of the intelligence community, because they contain a category of top secret information”.
Regardless of the explanation, Republican presidential hopefuls promptly went into the attack mode, with Donald Trump dubbing the finding “a disaster” for Clinton, quizzing: “At a minimum, how can someone with such bad (judgment) be our next presidentIJ” Senator Marco Rubio termed it “a disqualifier” for her, while Jeb Bush tweeted: “We need a president who can keep our secrets secret. Obviously that’s not Hillary Clinton.”
“The notion that a months-long process could be hit with 11th hour delays reeks of political favoritism designed to hide the ball from voters on the eve of early state voting,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. “Voters deserve to know the facts before they cast their ballots, not after.”
The disclosure on “top secret” contents could not have been more ill-timed for Clinton, who is locked in a tight contest with fellow-Democrat Bernie Sanders in Iowa that is set to kick off the presidential primaries on February 1.
The Clinton campaign, however, sought to put a brave front, with spokesman Brain Fallon terming it a case of “over-classification” by the intelligence community and demanding that the emails be made public as urged by Clinton at the time of turning them over to the State Department more than a year ago.
Sanders himself was a source of continued solace on the email controversy. Saying that the situation shouldn’t be politicized, the Senator from Vermont said in a statement: “The voters of Iowa and this nation deserve a serious discussion of the issues facing them.”
Clinton, who belatedly apologised last September for her use of a private email server during her time as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, has maintained all along that she did not send or receive through that server any information that was classified at the time.
“We firmly oppose the complete blocking of the release of these emails,” Fallon said in a statement.
