Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had emails on her private server that contained information so top-secret that the very lawmakers who oversee the State Department can’t read them without meeting “additional security requirements,” according to a report by Fox News’ Catherine Herridge.
According to the report, Clinton’s emails contained intelligence classified “at a level beyond top secret,” therefore, some of the lawmakers in both parties on the committees examining Clinton’s emails do not have the necessary security clearances to actually read them.
Herridge reports that despite their high-level clearances, even senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are not authorized to read the emails without taking additional security measures, including “signing new non-disclosure agreements.”
Fox News reported earlier this week that a letter from Inspector General of the Intelligence Agency Charles McCullough III indicated that there were “several dozen” such emails.
Asked about the IG’s letter during a recent interview with NPR, Democratic presidential front-runner Clinton described the findings as politically motivated.
“This seems to me to be, you know, another effort to inject this into the campaign, it's another leak,” Clinton said. “I'm just going to leave it up to the professionals at the Justice Department because nothing that this says changes the fact that I never sent or received material marked classified.”
During an appearance on Fox News on Thursday, Herridge characterized Clinton’s remarks as disingenuous.
“This is important for context,” Herridge said. “It is the content that is classified, not the format that it’s in, and to suggest to people that there’s somehow a big rubber stamp with ‘classified’ that’s smacked on every document is completely misleading and that is something you only see in the movies. And Mrs. Clinton knows better because she had to have special training as the secretary of state because she has classification authority. So that statement on its face is misleading at best, but simply not correct.”
