Sleep common cold, The State Department released on Monday evening its biggest trove yet of e-mails sent or received by former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, including a number of messages that were edited to remove material later deemed classified.
The e-mails are the latest in a rolling review of material that passed through an unorthodox private e-mail system that the Democratic presidential candidate has said she now regrets.
The more than 7,000 pages of e-mails, dating from 2009 and 2010, contain a heavy dose of mundane bureaucratic back and forth, a little gossip and an occasional glimpse into the murky terrain of sensitive but routine communications that are now the subject of an FBI inquiry.
About 150 of the e-mails were partially or entirely censored because the State Department determined they contained classified material, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Monday.
In one case, an e-mail later deemed classified by the State Department was written by Jacob J. Sullivan, Clinton’s top foreign policy adviser and now the senior policy adviser for her presidential campaign.
On Feb. 20, 2010, Clinton wrote Sullivan and asked, “I’d like to know about Bill Burns’s call w Russians today about both Iran and Start. Where are we on these?”
Sullivan responded with what he described as a “barebones readout” that career diplomat William J. Burns, an undersecretary of state, had typed out on his BlackBerry about efforts to tighten international sanctions against Iran and renew the Soviet-era nuclear arms agreement known as START.
The remainder of the e-mail has been redacted — withheld, according to a code included on the document, because it contained “foreign government information” and “foreign relations or foreign activities of the United States, including confidential sources.”
Another Sullivan e-mail from Nov. 23, 2010 is heavily redacted, and marked classified until 2025. Sullivan passed along an email tagged “No go on Burma travel.”
The Obama administration was then engaged in a delicate overture to the longtime military rulers of Burma, also known as Myanmar, that eventually resulted in a Clinton visit and the lifting of some sanctions.
The newly released e-mails show that one-time adviser Sidney Blumenthal continued to be one of Clinton’s most loyal correspondents. He passed along gossipy tidbits and news articles of interest. At one point, he passed along an article reporting the death of James Johnson, a segregationist judge from Arkansas who had led a campaign to dig up political opposition to Bill Clinton while he was president. In his February 2010 note, Blumenthal bemoaned that Johnson had not come to as “politically conclusive” end as a Civil War era figure who, upon hearing about the Confederate loss at Appomatox, “blew his brains out with a shotgun.”
Clinton responded, “What a sad ending to the tale.”
Correspondence between Clinton and Blumenthal covered the 2010 Academy Awards and Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’s impassioned dissent in the Citizens United political money case, which opened the door to unlimited super PAC spending.
“Good for him. I wish he were 50 instead 90!” Clinton wrote.
On Sept. 1, 2010, former president Jimmy Carter wrote a partially redacted note thanking Clinton and wishing her well as peace talks got underway in the Mideast. And he urged her to consider action elsewhere.
“My hope is that progress can now be made in the Middle East, Korea, Sudan, and Cuba,” he wrote. “And we are eager to help if you call on us. For instance, we have an enormous group of religious leaders with whom we have been working. . . . They can issue public statements, OpEds, etc. to support your efforts with the Israelis and Palestinians.” He signed the e-mail, passed to Clinton by her aide, Huma Abedin, “Jimmy”
The release of 4,368 documents puts the State Department ahead of a federal court-imposed goal to review and release 25 percent of the Clinton e-mail cache by the end of August, Toner said.
The retroactive classification was done to prepare the e-mails for public release, and the material was not marked as classified at the time Clinton sent or received the messages, the State Department said.The note was forwarded to Clinton by her chief of staff Cheryl Mills, with the note, “fyi.”
The censored material in the latest group of e-mails is classified at the “confidential” level, not at higher “top secret” or compartmentalized levels.
The potentially fine line between classified and unclassified material is made clear in another chain of e-mails. The exact topic of the chain of e-mails, exchanged between a series of State Department officials under the subject line “Rio Group-Haiti” in February 2010 is not exactly clear. But in one e-mail, an official begins, “Reinforcing my note yesterday on the high side . . . ,” a reference to the system used by State officials to properly exchange classified material. The remainder of the note, sent by Paul Simons, an ambassador, is redacted.
Although Clinton’s private system was known to close aides and a circle of friends and Obama administration officials when she was a Cabinet secretary, it was not publicly revealed until this year.
Among those who didn’t know about the private e-mail address was the “help desk” at the State Department, which sought information about why a correspondent was getting a “fatal error” when sending messages to Clinton’s obscure address. The tech support team “didn’t know it was you,” an aide tells Clinton.
When the system came to light this year, Clinton said it contained no classified material. She now says that she never sent or received any material on her private e-mail account that was marked classified at the time and that her actions were permitted under State Department rules. Still, she said last week that she regrets setting up the system as she did and takes responsibility for the poor decision.
She has said she discarded 30,000 pages of messages she deemed personal and unrelated to her government work.The security of the system and the potential mishandling of classified material is the subject of a Justice Department review that has clouded Clinton’s presidential campaign and contributed to a slide in her poll numbers.Clinton and her aides initially dismissed questions about the arrangement and whether she broke the rules as Republican smear tactics, but she acknowledged last week that voters also have concerns. “I get it,” she said then.
The FBI has declined to comment on the status of its investigation, but the agency has reached out to a Denver technology firm that Clinton hired to manage her server and to her attorney, who had kept a copy of her work e-mails on a thumb drive.
In late June, the office of I. Charles McCullough III, the intelligence community’s inspector general, reviewed a tiny sample of Clinton’s work e-mails — just 40 — and found that four, or 10 percent, contained classified information. Early in August, McCullough’s office alerted Congress that two of those e-mails contained top-secret information, including a discussion of a secret drone program that targets terrorists in Pakistan. Top secret is the highest category in the classification system.Under the law, it is the responsibility of the author of e-mails to properly mark them as classified and to make sure they avoid discussing classified material over a non-government or personal device.Because the State Department deals in so many sensitive secrets, many employees use two computer networks for their daily communications: a non-classified system called the “low side” and a more secure classified system called the “high side.” But Clinton had no official State Department e-mail address and exclusively used a personal domain and personal server set up in her home for electronic correspondence.
The e-mails are the latest in a rolling review of material that passed through an unorthodox private e-mail system that the Democratic presidential candidate has said she now regrets.
The more than 7,000 pages of e-mails, dating from 2009 and 2010, contain a heavy dose of mundane bureaucratic back and forth, a little gossip and an occasional glimpse into the murky terrain of sensitive but routine communications that are now the subject of an FBI inquiry.
About 150 of the e-mails were partially or entirely censored because the State Department determined they contained classified material, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Monday.
In one case, an e-mail later deemed classified by the State Department was written by Jacob J. Sullivan, Clinton’s top foreign policy adviser and now the senior policy adviser for her presidential campaign.
On Feb. 20, 2010, Clinton wrote Sullivan and asked, “I’d like to know about Bill Burns’s call w Russians today about both Iran and Start. Where are we on these?”
Sullivan responded with what he described as a “barebones readout” that career diplomat William J. Burns, an undersecretary of state, had typed out on his BlackBerry about efforts to tighten international sanctions against Iran and renew the Soviet-era nuclear arms agreement known as START.
The remainder of the e-mail has been redacted — withheld, according to a code included on the document, because it contained “foreign government information” and “foreign relations or foreign activities of the United States, including confidential sources.”
Another Sullivan e-mail from Nov. 23, 2010 is heavily redacted, and marked classified until 2025. Sullivan passed along an email tagged “No go on Burma travel.”
The Obama administration was then engaged in a delicate overture to the longtime military rulers of Burma, also known as Myanmar, that eventually resulted in a Clinton visit and the lifting of some sanctions.
The newly released e-mails show that one-time adviser Sidney Blumenthal continued to be one of Clinton’s most loyal correspondents. He passed along gossipy tidbits and news articles of interest. At one point, he passed along an article reporting the death of James Johnson, a segregationist judge from Arkansas who had led a campaign to dig up political opposition to Bill Clinton while he was president. In his February 2010 note, Blumenthal bemoaned that Johnson had not come to as “politically conclusive” end as a Civil War era figure who, upon hearing about the Confederate loss at Appomatox, “blew his brains out with a shotgun.”
Clinton responded, “What a sad ending to the tale.”
Correspondence between Clinton and Blumenthal covered the 2010 Academy Awards and Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’s impassioned dissent in the Citizens United political money case, which opened the door to unlimited super PAC spending.
“Good for him. I wish he were 50 instead 90!” Clinton wrote.
On Sept. 1, 2010, former president Jimmy Carter wrote a partially redacted note thanking Clinton and wishing her well as peace talks got underway in the Mideast. And he urged her to consider action elsewhere.
“My hope is that progress can now be made in the Middle East, Korea, Sudan, and Cuba,” he wrote. “And we are eager to help if you call on us. For instance, we have an enormous group of religious leaders with whom we have been working. . . . They can issue public statements, OpEds, etc. to support your efforts with the Israelis and Palestinians.” He signed the e-mail, passed to Clinton by her aide, Huma Abedin, “Jimmy”
The release of 4,368 documents puts the State Department ahead of a federal court-imposed goal to review and release 25 percent of the Clinton e-mail cache by the end of August, Toner said.
The retroactive classification was done to prepare the e-mails for public release, and the material was not marked as classified at the time Clinton sent or received the messages, the State Department said.The note was forwarded to Clinton by her chief of staff Cheryl Mills, with the note, “fyi.”
The censored material in the latest group of e-mails is classified at the “confidential” level, not at higher “top secret” or compartmentalized levels.
The potentially fine line between classified and unclassified material is made clear in another chain of e-mails. The exact topic of the chain of e-mails, exchanged between a series of State Department officials under the subject line “Rio Group-Haiti” in February 2010 is not exactly clear. But in one e-mail, an official begins, “Reinforcing my note yesterday on the high side . . . ,” a reference to the system used by State officials to properly exchange classified material. The remainder of the note, sent by Paul Simons, an ambassador, is redacted.
Although Clinton’s private system was known to close aides and a circle of friends and Obama administration officials when she was a Cabinet secretary, it was not publicly revealed until this year.
Among those who didn’t know about the private e-mail address was the “help desk” at the State Department, which sought information about why a correspondent was getting a “fatal error” when sending messages to Clinton’s obscure address. The tech support team “didn’t know it was you,” an aide tells Clinton.
When the system came to light this year, Clinton said it contained no classified material. She now says that she never sent or received any material on her private e-mail account that was marked classified at the time and that her actions were permitted under State Department rules. Still, she said last week that she regrets setting up the system as she did and takes responsibility for the poor decision.
She has said she discarded 30,000 pages of messages she deemed personal and unrelated to her government work.The security of the system and the potential mishandling of classified material is the subject of a Justice Department review that has clouded Clinton’s presidential campaign and contributed to a slide in her poll numbers.Clinton and her aides initially dismissed questions about the arrangement and whether she broke the rules as Republican smear tactics, but she acknowledged last week that voters also have concerns. “I get it,” she said then.
The FBI has declined to comment on the status of its investigation, but the agency has reached out to a Denver technology firm that Clinton hired to manage her server and to her attorney, who had kept a copy of her work e-mails on a thumb drive.
In late June, the office of I. Charles McCullough III, the intelligence community’s inspector general, reviewed a tiny sample of Clinton’s work e-mails — just 40 — and found that four, or 10 percent, contained classified information. Early in August, McCullough’s office alerted Congress that two of those e-mails contained top-secret information, including a discussion of a secret drone program that targets terrorists in Pakistan. Top secret is the highest category in the classification system.Under the law, it is the responsibility of the author of e-mails to properly mark them as classified and to make sure they avoid discussing classified material over a non-government or personal device.Because the State Department deals in so many sensitive secrets, many employees use two computer networks for their daily communications: a non-classified system called the “low side” and a more secure classified system called the “high side.” But Clinton had no official State Department e-mail address and exclusively used a personal domain and personal server set up in her home for electronic correspondence.
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