POLITICS

More Hillary Clinton Emails Released, Including 3 Now ‘Secret’

By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Hillary Clinton campaigning in Manchester, N.H., on Monday. The State Department on Saturday released 551 more emails from her personal server when she was secretary of state.
Richard Perry/The New York Times 
WASHINGTON — The State Department released 551 more emails from the personal server of Hillary Clinton on Saturday, including 84 with some or all of the messages blocked out because they contained information that has now been deemed classified. Three of those are classified “secret.”
Each of the secret emails included Mrs. Clinton’s comments atop forwarded chains of messages discussing tensions on the Sinai Peninsula; a visit by John Kerry to Pakistan in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death; and sensitive, back-channel talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.
The State Department has now classified as secret 21 emails from among 33,000 that were sent through the private server Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
An additional 22 emails — mostly referring to the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone strikes, officials have said — have been deemed to be “top secret.” Those are considered too sensitive to release to the public even with portions blocked out.

Document: Hillary Clinton Emails Released by State Department 

Secret is the highest level of classification the State Department can use; top secret is used by the nation’s intelligence agencies for their programs, information or sources of information.
The presence of classified information in the emails has become an issue in Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, as well as the subject of an investigation that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s general counsel, James A. Baker, acknowledged publicly for the first time last week.
The State Department took the unusual step of releasing more emails on a Saturday in the middle of a holiday weekend because of a court order last week that ensures a steady stream of releases between now and the end of February.
It is expected to be a period of intense campaigning in Mrs. Clinton’s effort to defeat Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination — with caucuses in Nevada and a primary in South Carolina. The final release of emails is now scheduled for Feb. 29, the day before voting in several states on Super Tuesday.
Mrs. Clinton and her aides have said the State Department and the intelligence agencies are overzealously classifying information that was not marked classified at the time. The author of one of the emails marked as “secret” and released on Saturday, Dennis B. Ross, agreed.
Mr. Ross, a former official at the State Department and National Security Council, drafted a two-page email to Mrs. Clinton on Sept. 22, 2012, offering “a few thoughts for your upcoming meetings.” Mr. Ross had left the government, but continued to act as an intermediary in back-channel talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, a role he discussed in a new book, “Doomed to Succeed.”
Virtually all that followed in the message has been redacted, or blocked out, with the contents classified on national security grounds until Sept. 21, 2037. Mrs. Clinton replied to the email with a short note: “Thanks, Dennis. Can you talk this morning?”
Although those talks were diplomatically sensitive and were not disclosed, Mr. Ross said in an interview that nothing about the discussion should be classified. He added that he had submitted the chapter of his book dealing with the talks for a security review and that it was cleared for publication.
“It shows the arbitrariness of what is now being classified,” Mr. Ross said.
One of the other emails classified secret included a lengthy chain of messages involving the Sinai Peninsula that was copied to a number of administration officials. It included messages written in August 2012 by David M. Satterfield, a former ambassador who was serving as director general of the international peacekeeping force in the Sinai. At the time, the region faced a growing insurgency after the ouster of Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak.
The subject line in the final message, which was forwarded to Mrs. Clinton, read, “Molho on Sinai Tensions,” an apparent reference to the senior Israel security adviser, Isaac Molho. The contents have been redacted entirely.
The third “secret” email included a reference to Mr. Kerry’s wanting to speak to her. It was written during his visit in May 2011, when he was a senator, to Pakistan, where he sought to calm Pakistani anger over the secret raid that killed Bin Laden.
In addition to those three, 81 other emails were classified at the lowest level, or “confidential.” One of those includes a chain of messages forwarding an article from The Telegraph, a newspaper in Britain, detailing remarks from John Sawers, then the chief of that country’s intelligence service, MI6, about efforts to foil Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
“Most unfortunate on many levels to say the least,” the State Department’s chief negotiator on Iran’s program, Wendy R. Sherman, wrote in remarks that were not redacted. Mrs. Clinton replied to the last forward, “Gobsmacking!”
The State Department has been steadily releasing the emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server under the Freedom of Information Act. The process was supposed to have finished last month, but the department appealed to the Federal District Court overseeing the case for an extension through February. It did so because of the lengthy and at times contentious processof having the nation’s intelligence agencies review all of the messages for classified information.
In filings to Judge Rudolph Contreras of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia last week, the State Department described the difficulties it has had meeting the timeline for releasing all the emails — an effort officials have said is laborious and costly, requiring the recruitment of dozens of officials. In one case, a computer problem prevented about 7,000 pages of emails — most of those remaining — from being distributed to various intelligence agencies for review.
Another has been what one official described as the onerous task of reviewing the emails in the State Department’s classified network and then transferring them to the unclassified network where they are prepared for posting publicly by “burning,” or redacting information.
“Several steps are involved in transferring documents from that system to a public-facing website while still protecting sensitive national security information,” Eric F. Stein, a State Department official, wrote in a filing on Wednesday.
The fact that emails sent on Mrs. Clinton’s unclassified server must now be reviewed on the department’s classified network — with hundreds being released only with redactions — could be viewed as an indication that at least some of the information in the roughly 33,000 emails turned over by Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers should never have been sent on an unclassified network.
In a letter to one of the State Department’s lawyers regarding another request for emails under the Freedom of Information Act, Mr. Baker of the F.B.I. wrote that the bureau had “acknowledged generally that it is working on matters related to former Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server,” but he declined to detail the nature of that work.
The bureau, he wrote, has not “publicly acknowledged the specific focus, scope or potential target of any such proceedings.”
The next batch of emails will be released on Friday, followed by releases on Feb. 26 and 29.