Uh oh: Number of Hillary Emails Flagged for Classified Material Now Exceeds 300

More than 300 of former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails — or 5.1 percent of those processed so far — have been flagged for potential secret information, the State Department reported to a federal court Monday. Officials insisted, however, that the screening process is running smoothly and they are back on track after falling behind a judge’s schedule for making all of the emails public. The reviewers have screened about 20 percent of the 30,000 emails Mrs. Clinton returned to the department, which means if the rate of potentially secret information remains steady, more than 1,500 messages will have to be sent to intelligence community agencies, known in government as “IC,” to screen out classified information. “Out of a sample of approximately 20% of the Clinton emails, the IC reviewers have only recommended 305 documents — approximately 5.1% — for referral to their agencies for consultation,” the Obama administration said in new court papers.

Hillary takes credit for email release--which happened under duress of probe/media scrutiny, post-mass deletion: https://t.co/aF29QFOACp

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) August 17, 2015

She actually turned over nothing – nada – when she left office as Secretary of State, failing to comply with official government policy. When the State Department finally asked her to turn over all of her work-related emails nearly two years later (to comply with a request by the Benghazi Select Committee), she and her lawyers alone decided which emails to provide to the Obama administration. And then they wiped her server clean, deleting tens of thousands of other messages. A December 2012 letter from the House Oversight Committee asked her the following: “Have you or any senior agency official ever used a personal email account to conduct official business? If so, please identify the account used.” She never responded.

Earlier this year, Gawker Media sued the State Department over its response to a Freedom of Information Act request we filed in 2013, in which we sought emails exchanged between reporters at 33 news outlets and Philippe Reines, the former deputy assistant secretary of state and aggressive defender of Hillary Clinton. Over two years ago, the department claimed that “no records responsive to your request were located”—a baffling assertion, given Reines’ well-documented correspondence with journalists. Late last week, however, the State Department came up with a very different answer: It had located an estimated 17,000 emails responsive to Gawker’s request. On August 13, lawyers for the U.S. Attorney General submitted a court-ordered status report to the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia in which it disclosed that State employees had somehow discovered “5.5 gigabytes of data containing 81,159 emails of varying length” that were sent or received by Reines during his government tenure. Of those emails, the attorneys added, “an estimated 17,855” were likely responsive to Gawker’s request[.]