Judge Adds Fuel to Clinton Email Controversy

Says Hillary didn't comply with government policy regarding her private account
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 21, 2015 6:00 AM CDT
Judge Adds Fuel to Clinton Email Controversy
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks at a town hall meeting Tuesday in North Las Vegas.   (AP Photo/John Locher)

Hillary Clinton says no classified info was ever kept on her personal email account, but a federal judge said yesterday she didn't comply with government policy by using that account, the New York Times reports. "We wouldn't be here today if the employee had followed government policy," Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said during a hearing in an FOIA lawsuit against the State Department to gain access to Clinton's records during her secretary of state reign. The judge also told the FBI, which has Clinton's server at the moment, to turn over any emails related to the suit; the Times sees him as having "opened the door" for the FBI to swell its probe to include emails Clinton may have deleted. Clinton's camp continues to fight all charges of impropriety.

As for the question of whether Clinton harbored classified info on this email account, Reuters says yes. The news agency scoured through emails already out there and found dozens of threads with emails containing "foreign government information"—info that's "born classified," an ex-director of the Information Security Oversight Office tells Reuters. "If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by US rules that is classified at the moment it's in US channels and US possession," he says, noting the State Department would be "blowing smoke" to say otherwise. A State Department spokesman called Reuters' assertions "outlandish" in an email to Fox News, but he then amended his take, saying, "We do not have the ability to go back and re-create all of the various factors that would have gone into the [classification] determinations." (Reuters also tries to square the declassification dates.)

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