‘Top Secret’ Clinton Emails Include Discussion of Drone Operation

Two emails on Hillary Clinton’s private server that a federal auditor deemed “top secret” include a discussion of a news article detailing a U.S. drone strike and a conversation that could inappropriately point toward highly classified material, U.S. officials told The Associated Press.

AP reports via The Guardian:

The sourcing of the information could have significant political implications as the 2016 presidential campaign heats up. Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, agreed this week to turn over to the FBI the private server she used as secretary of state, and Republicans in Congress have seized on the involvement of federal law enforcement as a sign that she was either negligent with the nation’s secrets or worse.

On Monday, the inspector general for the 17 spy agencies that make up what is known as the intelligence community told Congress that two of 40 emails in a random sample of the 30,000 emails Clinton gave the State Department for review contained information deemed “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information”, one of the government’s highest levels of classification.

The drone exchange, the officials said, begins with a copy of a news article that discusses the CIA drone program that targets terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere. While a secret program, it is well-known and often reported on. The copy makes reference to classified information, and a Clinton adviser follows up by dancing around a top secret in a way that could possibly be inferred as confirmation, they said. Several officials, however, described this claim as tenuous.

But a second email reviewed by Charles McCullough, the intelligence community inspector general, appears more suspect. Nothing in the message is “lifted” from classified documents, the officials said, though they differed on where the information in it was sourced. Some said it improperly points back to highly classified material, while others countered that it was a classic case of what the government calls “parallel reporting” — different people knowing the same thing through different means.

Read more here.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.