WASHINGTON — The State Department released about 7,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails Monday, including about 150 e-mails that have been censored because they contain information that is now deemed classified.
Department officials said the redacted information was classified in preparation for the public release of the e-mails and not identified as classified at the time Clinton sent or received the messages. All the censored material in the latest group of e-mails is classified at the “confidential” level, not at higher “top secret” or compartmentalized levels, they said.
Still, the increasing amounts of blacked-out information from Clinton’s e-mail history as secretary of state might prompt additional questions about her handling of government secrets while in office and that of her most trusted advisers.
The Democratic presidential front-runner says her use of a home e-mail server for government business was a mistake. Government inspectors have pointed to exchanges that never should have been sent via unsecured channels. State Department spokesman Mark Toner insisted that nothing encountered in the agency’s review of Clinton’s documents “was marked classified.”
The release Monday evening amounted to more pages of e-mail than disclosed in the previous three months combined. Once published, it will mean a quarter of all of the correspondence Clinton qualified as “work e-mails” has been published.
