- Mon Aug 17, 2015 4:44 pm
#61819
A group of intelligence agency officials have identified a little greater than 300 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server for further review to consider whether they contained classified information, according to a court filing Monday.The Clintons should be footing the bill for all this, not the American tax payers because the Clintons chose to do this.
Officials have referred 305 documents, or 5 percent of the review sample, to their agencies for further review, State Department lawyers said in the court filing obtained by The Hill.
That could suggest that by the time officials finish reviewing the approximately 30,000 emails that Clinton turned over, some 1,500 will likely be referred to federal agencies to see whether they contained classified material.
Officials have reviewed nearly a quarter of the Clinton emails as of Friday. The State Department is required to file reports to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on its review of the Clinton emails. It is conducting the review because the court ruled the emails had to be regularly released after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by Vice News.
Reviewers from five different intelligence agencies on July 15 joined the State Department's review of the emails after concerns were raised by inspectors general for the State Department and intelligence community. It's estimated that thousands of man hours will be needed to just sort through the emails, then comes the task of determining potential damages and what actions to take due to the potential that some may be in the hands of hostile governments.
Complicating the matter; adding time and money is that Hillary Clinton chose to comply to the release by providing print outs of the emails, rather than the actual emails as requested. This resulted in hundreds of extra man hours scanning and copying the 30,000 pages of documents so that more than one agency can review them at a time.
“They are conducting a screening process to determine whether there are [intelligence community] equities in the emails, not a full-scale FOIA review of the emails,” State Department lawyers said.
Out of the emails publicly released by the State Department, over 60 were flagged as sensitive for containing information classified mostly at the lowest level of “confidential.” One was classified at the intermediate "secret" level at the request of the FBI.
Another two emails were found by the intelligence inspector to be “top secret.”
The latest figure was first reported by The Washington Times and NBC News.
- By johnforbes
- By brandon