Roughly 150 of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails include information that has been retroactively upgraded to classified, a U.S. government official told CNN Monday.
Those emails, sent to the personal address on a private server that Clinton used during her time as secretary of state, were not marked “classified” at the time they were sent, the official said.
They will be part of a 7,000-page tranche the State Department will release Monday night. Once those emails are out, the department says it will have released a total of 25% of Clinton’s emails from her four years as America’s top diplomat.
The Democratic front-runner in the 2016 presidential race has faced five months of criticism for using her personal email address — connected to her own private server, limiting the government’s access to those emails — during her four years as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state.
The latest round of emails are set to be released at about 9 p.m. Monday. Deputy State Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters Monday about 150 of those more than 7,000 pages of emails have been retroactively classified.
“(Although) until we release it, we don’t have a firm number,” he told reporters during a daily briefing.
Toner said retroactive classification “certainly does not speak to whether (the information) was classified at the time it was sent or handled or however forwarded or received.”
“And we’ve always been very clear that nothing that we’ve seen so far was ever marked classified,” he said.
Toner would not say whether information from foreign government communications should have been classified at the time they were sent.
Classification is “not often a black-and-white process,” he said. “Our clear focus is on clearing these emails, redacting them as necessary in order to safeguard anything that we’ve deemed now should be upgraded in classification.”
The State Department is under a federal judge’s order to regularly process and release emails that Clinton has turned over, which means a new batch typically comes at the end of each month.
Clinton has turned her server over to the FBI amid an investigation into her emails, as intelligence agencies comb through to determine whether classified information was mishandled. Her campaign has said that the innocuous emails released so far show that she wasn’t putting closely guarded secrets at risk.
