Hillary Clinton sent and received dozens of sensitive emails while she was US secretary of state
Hillary Clinton wrote 104 emails 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 emails during her State Department tenure. Clinton’s authorship of dozens of emails 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.
READ MORE: US State Department releases final batch of Clinton emails, as tally of classified messages passes 2,000
The analysis also showed that the practice of using non-secure email systems to send sensitive information was widespread at the department and elsewhere in government.
Clinton’s publicly released correspondence also includes classified emails written by about 300 other people inside and outside the government, the analysis by The Post found. The senders included long-time diplomats, top administration officials and foreigners who held no US security clearance.
In those cases, Clinton was typically not among the initial recipients of the classified emails, 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 email 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.
