State Department officials have declared 22 of Hillary Clinton’s private emails “top secret” and will be withholding them in full. The 22 emails represent seven full email chains that take up 37 pages, the agency said Friday.
The news came just days after the agency told a federal judge it would not meet a court-ordered deadline for publishing the last batch of Clinton’s emails by Friday. Agency officials asked the court to allow them to delay the release of roughly 8,000 emails until the end of February, after the first wave of Democratic primaries.
The State Department says it is also looking into whether some of the Clinton emails were classified when they were written. For months, the agency has publicly insisted that none of the emails were considered classified when they were sent or received.
Clinton has repeatedly argued that nothing she sent or received was classified at the time. But the new revelations suggest she indeed transmitted highly sensitive material on her private server.
Intelligence community officials have even suggested some of that material was classified above top secret. State Department officials declined to comment on those findings Friday.
The State Department is slated to release roughly 1,000 pages of emails late Friday evening, falling 8,000 pages short of a court-ordered benchmark.
