Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information on an unsecured server continued to overshadow her presidential campaign Monday morning, just as Iowans readied themselves to caucus in the first contest of 2016.
Three days earlier, the former secretary of state found herself in a familiar situation: tamping down shock over a new wrinkle in the email controversy.
But this time, she was facing the scrutiny without the backing of State Department officials, whose ambiguity on the issue of classified emails has shielded Clinton from criticism for months. The State Department announced Friday it planned to withhold 37 pages of emails deemed “top secret” from a small batch of records slated for release later that evening.
Republican lawmakers quickly highlighted the gravity of the latest development, while Democratic leaders rallied around their presidential front-runner.
“These documents were classified top secret, not by the intelligence community, not by the [intelligence community inspector general] — each of which Secretary Clinton has accused of being partisan — but by Secretary Clinton’s State Department,” Rep. Mike Pompeo told the Washington Examiner. “Top secret information — top secret, not confidential, not secret, but top secret — by its very nature presents risks to American national security.”
Pompeo, who serves on both the House Intelligence Committee and the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said Clinton’s public explanation of the classified material centers on an argument that is “completely irrelevant.”
“There is this careful parsing about whether information is marked or unmarked,” he said. “The legal obligation for the handling of material that is classified does not turn on whether it is marked or unmarked in anyway.”
“If I spoke to you right now and gave you a classified story, there’s no stamp on that,” the Kansas Republican explained. “It is the information that matters, not whether or not someone has put a header on it.”
Pompeo said officials who handle classified material, including himself, must sign non-disclosure agreements that forbid them from sharing sensitive data in any form.
“The non-disclosure agreement that I signed didn’t say, ‘But you’re permitted to disclose the information on your private server, Mike, as long as you’ve stripped off the header that says top secret,'” he said. “But that’s the argument that’s being made.”
In a spate of media appearances Monday morning intended to drum up support ahead of the caucuses, Clinton was hit with questions about her top secret emails. She repeated the argument that she broke no rules because the emails in question were not marked classified and that they were sent to her, not written by her.
“It’s a little bit like what the Republicans and others have tried to do with respect to Benghazi,” she said of the controversy on CNN’s “New Day,” accusing officials of “selectively leaking” information about an FBI investigation into her emails.
Matt Wolking, spokesman for Republicans on the Benghazi committee, told the Examiner it was “wrong to conflate her testimony before the committee” with the unrelated FBI investigation.
“None of the Secretary of State’s emails would have been discovered if not for the work of the Select Committee on Benghazi, but the FBI’s subsequent investigation into the top secret, classified information on her unsecure, private server is an entirely separate issue and wholly unrelated to the committee’s narrow focus on what happened before, during and after the terrorists attacks that killed four Americans,” Wolking said. “She was wrong to conflate a YouTube video with the terrorist attacks, she is wrong to conflate her testimony before the committee with the FBI’s investigation into her unprecedented email arrangement, and she is wrong to continue to mislead the American people.”
Clinton has repeatedly pointed to her 11-hour testimony before the select committee in October as evidence that she has already addressed the email controversy.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, argued Friday Clinton could not “be held responsible for emails that originated with someone else.”
“[N]one of the emails sent to Secretary Clinton have the mandatory markings that are required when classified information is transmitted,” Feinstein said in a statement. “The only reason to hold Secretary Clinton responsible for emails that didn’t originate with her is for political points, and that’s what we’ve seen over the past several months.”
Clinton touted Feinstein’s explanation in an interview with ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, highlighting the California Democrat’s statement as evidence that Republicans had exaggerated the sensitive nature of the 22 emails in question.
But Pompeo said Feinstein’s comment was “false on its face.”
“The vast majority of classified material that a secretary of state reads or a congressman reads … 99.99 percent of it, they don’t originate,” he said. “My legal duty to handle that classified material … does not in any way turn on whether I originated it.”
Clinton’s spokesman demanded the release of the 22 top secret emails Friday, shortly after the State Department said none of the records would be included in an upcoming release.
The former secretary of state continued to blame the hype on a bureaucratic dispute over what should be considered classified despite the fact that the State Department’s move Friday brought it into agreement with other federal agencies that have for months argued some of Clinton’s emails needed a “top secret” designation.
“There’s no dispute here,” Pompeo said. “This is a dispute between Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign and the U.S. government, not a partisan witch hunt.”
Republican presidential candidates have seized on the latest development in Clinton’s email saga as another way to attack her campaign as she heads into a tight race with Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Hawkeye State this week.
Even Sanders, who famously shrugged off the controversy last year by quipping in a debate that Americans were “sick and tired of hearing” about her “damn emails,” changed his tune Sunday when he admitted Clinton’s possession of top secret information on her private server was “a very serious issue.”
Polls show Clinton and Sanders locked in a tight fight in Iowa.
