A handful of Hillary Clinton’s emails may never see the light of day because State Department officials have deemed them too sensitive for release to the public.
While more than 1,300 emails have so far been marked classified and heavily redacted, an unknown number of records in the remaining batch of Clinton emails could be withheld altogether by the State Department because they’re “too damaging” to national security, Fox News reported Friday.
Provisions in the Freedom of Information Act allow government agencies to prevent the release of entire documents if they contain material too sensitive to be seen by the public. In those cases, even redacting the bulk of the document is not enough to mitigate the risks posed by releasing it.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday there has been “no political interference” in the State Department’s decision to delay the release of the Clinton emails until after the first round of Democratic primaries. The agency was required to publish more than 9,000 pages of emails by Friday, but will instead release roughly 1,000 and attempt to push the publication of the remaining records until the end of February.
The last-minute delay has touched off a firestorm of criticism against the State Department, which sought to change a court-ordered schedule it had agreed to follow in May of last year.
What’s more, the agency blamed an accidental “oversight” for the massive delay on the eve of the Iowa caucus on Monday.
