FBI steps up interviews in Clinton email probe

[leveymg]

16. Helps if you read the entire article. The material was found classified to Secret.

The story four days ago reported only that two emails of four previously found to be classified at the Top Secret level by the IG of the Intelligence Community had been downgraded by DNI Clapper to "secret." That still classified, and it is still illegal to store or transmit such documents over an unapproved private server.

State or other agencies may eventually determine that the emails in question contain classified information, but the recent action cleared State to handle the two emails in State's standard FOIA system, which is authorized only for information classified up to the "Secret" level — the middle of the three main tiers of national security information.

The two emails are part of a set of four emails McCullough's investigators flagged after obtaining access earlier this year to a sample of 40 emails among the 30,000 Clinton stored on a private server and provided to her former agency last December. "My office's limited sampling of 40 of the emails revealed [that] four contained classified intelligence community information that should have been marked and handled at the SECRET level," McCullough wrote to lawmakers on July 23.

Concerns about the four emails McCullough's investigators isolated appear to have set in motion a series of critical events in the email saga. State stepped up its efforts to have Clinton's private attorney David Kendall return thumb drives.

State decided back in May that one email in the Clinton collection contained "Secret" information about arrests possibly linked to the attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi. At that time, Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy asked Kendall to delete all copies of that email and return all paper copies to the department. Kendall declined to delete the electronic copies because of outstanding preservation requests from inspectors general and congressional committees.

However, the classification of that email as secret did not set off the scramble that began in late July when the intelligence inspector general flagged the set of four from the sample of 40. The flagging of those four emails by the ICIG led to a formal referral to the FBI of a potential counterintelligence breach.l/b]

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/hillary-clinton-email-no-highly-classified-215599#ixzz3r7hVIb5g