WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton received information on her private email account about the deadly attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi that was later classified “secret” at the request of the FBI, according to documents released Friday, underscoring lingering questions about how responsibly she handled sensitive information on a home server.
The nearly 900 pages of her correspondence released by the State Department also contained several messages that were deemed sensitive but unclassified, detailed her daily schedule and contained information — censored in the documents as released — about the CIA that the government is barred from publicly disclosing.
Taken together, the correspondence provides examples of material considered to be sensitive that Clinton, the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, received on the account run out of her home. She has said the private server had “numerous safeguards.”
Clinton’s decision while secretary of state to opt out of a State Department email account has become a political problem for her, as the Republican-led House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks has used the disclosures of her email usage to paint her as secretive and above standard scrutiny.
Clinton, campaigning in New Hampshire, said Friday she was aware that the FBI now wanted some of the email to be classified, “but that doesn’t change the fact all of the information in the emails was handled appropriately.”
Asked if she was concerned it was on a private server, she replied, “No.”
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said, “It was not classified at the time. The occurrence of subsequent upgrade does not mean anyone did anything wrong.”
It’s not clear if Clinton’s home computer system used encryption software to communicate securely with government email services. That would have protected her communications from the prying eyes of foreign spies, hackers, or anyone interested on the Internet.
Last year, Clinton gave the State Department 55,000 pages of emails that she said pertained to her work as secretary sent from her personal address. Only messages related to the 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were released by the department on Friday. The 296 emails had already been turned over to the House Benghazi committee.
A Nov. 18, 2012, message about arrests in Libya was not classified at the time, meaning no laws were violated, but was upgraded from “unclassified” to “secret” on Friday at the request of the FBI to redact information that could contain information damaging to national security or foreign relations.
Twenty-three words were redacted from the message, which detailed reports of arrests in Libya of people who might have connections to the attack, Harf said.
The redacted portion appears to relate to people who provided information about the alleged suspects to the Libyans. That part of the email had been categorized by the State Department as “NOFORN,” meaning that foreign nationals weren’t allowed to read it, including close U.S. allies.
As early as April 2011, Clinton was forwarded a message sent to her staff that the situation in the country had worsened to the point “where Stevens is considering departure from Benghazi,” The email was marked “Importance: High.”