Hillary Clinton wrote 104 e-mails that she sent using her private server while secretary of state that the government has since said contain classified information, according to a new Washington Post analysis of Clinton’s publicly released correspondence.
The finding is the first accounting of the Democratic presidential front-runner’s personal role in placing information now considered sensitive into insecure e-mail during her State Department tenure.
Clinton’s authorship of dozens of e-mails now considered classified could complicate her efforts to argue that she never put government secrets at risk.
Clinton sometimes initiated the conversations. More often, she was replying to aides or other officials with brief reactions to ongoing discussions.
The analysis also showed that the practice of using nonsecure e-mail systems to send sensitive information was widespread at the department and elsewhere in government.
Clinton’s publicly released correspondence also includes classified e-mails written by about 300 other people inside and outside the government, the analysis by The Post found. The senders included longtime diplomats, top administration officials and foreigners who held no U.S. security clearance.
In those cases, Clinton was typically not among the initial recipients of the classified e-mails, which were included in back-and-forth exchanges between lower-level diplomats and other officials and arrived in her inbox only after they were forwarded to her by a close aide.
For federal employees other than Clinton, nearly all of the sensitive e-mail was sent using their less secure, day-to-day government accounts. Classified information is supposed to be exchanged only over a separate, more secure network.
The Post analysis is based on an examination of the 2,093 chains of Clinton’s e-mail correspondence that the State Department decided contained classified information.
The agency released 52,000 pages of Clinton’s e-mails as part of a court-ordered process but blocked the sensitive information from public view. The Post identified the author of each e-mail that contained such redactions.
The analysis raises difficult questions about how the government treats sensitive information. It suggests that either material is being overclassified, as Clinton and her allies have charged, or that classified material is being handled improperly with regularity by government officials at all levels — or some combination of the two.
The analysis did not account for 22 e-mails that the State Department has withheld entirely from public release because they are “top secret,” the highest level of classification.
The handling of those e-mails has drawn particular criticism from Republican lawmakers and officials in the intelligence community, who have argued that Clinton’s use of a private server exposed some of the government’s most closely guarded secrets to hacking or other potential breaches.
The FBI is investigating the security of the server and whether Clinton or her aides mishandled classified information.
Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said the large number of people who sent and received e-mails that were declared classified was a sign of “overclassification run amok, and indicates that our system for determining what ought to be classified is broken.”
Regarding Clinton’s role in writing 104 of the e-mails, Fallon said the classification determinations “were after-the-fact … for the purposes of preparing these e-mails for release publicly.”
“It does not mean the material was classified when it was sent or received,” he said.
Clinton has struggled to fend off the e-mail controversy since it was revealed last year that she used the private server. Republican presidential candidates have vowed to make an issue out of her handling of classified information, with front-runner Donald Trump saying last week: “What she did is a criminal act. If she’s allowed to run, I would be very, very surprised.”
A key question facing Clinton is whether any of the e-mails she authored — or any of the correspondence stored on her private server — contained information that was classified at the time it was sent.
