WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton received information on her private e-mail account about the deadly attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi that was later classified “secret” at the request of the FBI, according to documents released Friday.
The release underscores lingering questions about how responsibly she handled sensitive information on a home server.
The nearly 900 pages of her correspondence released by the State Department also contained messages that were deemed sensitive but unclassified. The messages detailed her daily schedule and contained information — censored in the documents as released — about the CIA that the government is barred from publicly disclosing.
Taken together, the correspondence provides examples of material considered to be sensitive that Clinton, the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, received on the account run out of her home. She has said the private server had “numerous safeguards.”
Clinton’s decision while secretary of state to opt out of a State Department e-mail account has become a political problem for her. The Republican-led House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks has used the disclosures of her e-mail server to paint her as secretive and above standard scrutiny.
Clinton, campaigning in New Hampshire, said Friday she was aware that the FBI now wanted some of the e-mails to be classified, “but that doesn’t change the fact all of the information in the e-mails was handled appropriately.”
Asked whether she was concerned it was on a private server, she replied, “No.”
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said, “It was not classified at the time. The occurrence of subsequent upgrade does not mean anyone did anything wrong.”
It’s not clear whether Clinton’s home computer system used encryption software to communicate securely with government e-mail services. That would have protected her communications from the prying eyes of foreign spies or hackers.
Last year, Clinton gave the State Department 55,000 pages of e-mails that she said pertained to her work as secretary sent from her personal address.
Only messages related to the 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, were released by the department Friday. The 296 e-mails already had been turned over to the House Benghazi committee.
A Nov. 18, 2012, message about arrests in Libya was not classified at the time, meaning no laws were violated, but was upgraded from “unclassified” to “secret” on Friday at the request of the FBI to redact information.
Twenty-three words were redacted from the message, which detailed reports of arrests in Libya of people who might have connections to the attack, Harf said.
The redacted portion appears to relate to people who provided information about the alleged suspects to the Libyans.
The message, originally from Bill Roebuck, then director of the Office of Maghreb Affairs, was forwarded to Clinton by her deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan, with the comment: “fyi.”
No other redactions were made to the collection of Benghazi-related e-mails for classification reasons, officials said.
Excerpt from the e-mails
In a September 2012 e-mail to Hillary Rodham Clinton, top aide Jake Sullivan told her that another Obama administration official, Susan Rice, stumbled in an appearance on ABC’s Sunday news show “This Week.” Rice was criticized for insisting the Benghazi attack was spurred by Libyan street protests over an anti-Muslim video and not planned by al-Qaeda-inspired militants.
In an e-mail addressed to “H” that included a full transcript of Rice’s interview, Sullivan said Rice, who was then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, “did make clear our view that this started spontaneously and then evolved. The only troubling sentence relates to the investigation, specifically: ‘And we’ll see when the investigation unfolds whether what was — what transpired in Benghazi might have unfolded differently in different circumstances.’ ” Sullivan then added, “But she got pushed there.” The Associated Press
