State Department spokesperson Marie Harf on Friday couldn’t explain how sensitive information, some of which was upgraded to classified the day it was slated to be published, ended up in emails that originated from Hillary Clinton’s private server.
Instead, she was only able to offer a theory of what might have happened.
“It’s possible that the degree of sensitivity … evolved over time,” Harf said when asked at State’s daily briefing Friday.
Harf was asked questions about the contents of Clinton’s email shortly after State released about 300 of the emails Clinton turned over to the department last year. In one email, information was redacted and classified because it involves the arrest of individuals suspected of playing a role in the 2012 terror attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi that claimed four American lives.
Harf noted the information, which was redacted from a Nov. 18, 2012 email released Friday along with 295 other messages, was classified on the same day it was released at the request of the FBI.
She said the State Department was not behind the leak of 349 pages of emails to the New York Times, which the paper made public Thursday, and denied knowledge of who might have passed on the documents.
Harf’s defense of the informal intelligence memos Sidney Blumenthal prepared for Clinton closely mirrored what the presidential candidate told reporters at a campaign event earlier in the week.
“Secretaries often get information from a variety of sources,” Harf said, noting that Clinton “sometimes … passed these on.”
Blumenthal’s intelligence reports have sparked controversy in the days since the House Select Committee on Benghazi subpoenaed the former Clinton aide to testify about his involvement in the State Department’s response to the Benghazi attack.
Harf said the agency will file a plan to release the remaining documents with the court Tuesday.
“I expect that we may be indicating when the first rolling production will be,” Harf said.
She added that the State Department is “focused on doing this as quickly as possible” and that it would be “expediting more resources” to prepare the records for publication.
