The State Department on Thursday released 5,500 more pages of Hillary Clinton's emails from the private email account she used exclusively during her tenure as secretary of state. However, the department failed to meet a court-ordered target of releasing 82 percent of the total emails by the end of 2015, reported The Washington Times.
The State Department said it failed to meet the judge's goal of releasing 45,000 pages of the total 55,000 by the end of the year because of "the large number of documents involved and the holiday schedule."
"We have worked diligently to come as close to the goal as possible, but with the large number of documents involved and the holiday schedule we have not met the goal this month," the State Department said in a statement. "To narrow that gap, the State Department will make another production of former Secretary Clinton's email sometime next week."
The latest batch includes 3,105 emails from 2009 to 2013. Among them are 275 documents that have been upgraded to classified since they arrived in Clinton's inbox, bringing the total number of classified documents found in Clinton's emails to 1,274. Most were marked "confidential," while two in the latest batch were upgraded to the "secret" level, a more sensitive classification reserved for national security issues, according to Fox News.
Here are some of the more notable exchanges found in the latest batch:
• Billionaire liberal donor George Soros told a former Clinton aide that he should have supported Clinton in the 2008 primaries rather than Barack Obama.
Soros told Neera Tanden during a Democracy Alliance dinner that he "regretted his decision in the primary - he likes to admit mistakes when he makes them and that was one of them," Tanden wrote to Clinton in May 2012. "He then extolled his work with you from your time as First Lady on." Soros told Tanden that he was impressed that he "can always call/meet" with Clinton on policy issues but hadn't been able to meet with Obama, according to The Associated Press.
• In one email, Clinton was informed that the now-famous photo of her wearing sunglasses and reading her Blackberry on a plane had gone viral. In April 2012, her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, forwarded an email with the subject line "Photo gone viral!" Clinton replied, "Why now? That was on the way to Libya?" Mills reassured Clinton, "You look cute." The picture inspired the "Texts from Hillary" meme, notes NBC News.
• An exchange in September 2010 between Clinton and one of her closest aides, Jake Sullivan, showed confusion over her email practices. "I'm never sure which of my emails you receive, so pls let me know if you receive this one and on which address you did," Clinton wrote to Sullivan.
Sullivan responded: "I have just received this email on my personal account, which I check much less frequently than my State Department account. I have not received any emails from you on my State account in recent days - for example, I did not get the email you sent to me and (Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Jeff) Feltman on the Egyptian custody case. Something is very wrong with the connection there."
He added, "I suppose a near-term fix is to just sen messages to this account - my personal account - and I will check it more frequently."
• Clinton's senior communications adviser Philippe Reines put together a pecking order flow chart during the summer of 2012 to help determine who is allowed to ride with Clinton. Longtime aide Huma Abedin should ride with Clinton most of the time. If Abedin was out of town, deputy chief of staff Sullivan should ride with Clinton, and if Sullivan wasn't available, chief of protocol Capricia Marshall would ride, according to USA Today.
The flow chart also included a breakdown of what to do if an ambassador was not tolerable and the drive was longer than 10 minutes - Clinton would ride by herself.
After the release of the latest batch of emails, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus issued a statement saying that the upgraded classified emails prove Clinton cannot be trusted.
"With more than 1,250 emails containing classified information now uncovered, Hillary Clinton's decision to put secrecy over national security by exclusively operating off of a secret email server looks even more reckless," he said in a statement on Thursday, according to AP.
"When this scandal first broke, Hillary Clinton assured the American people there was no classified material on her unsecure server, a claim which has since been debunked on a monthly basis with each court-ordered release. With an expanded FBI investigation underway and new details emerging about the conflicts of interest her server was designed to conceal, Hillary Clinton has shown she lacks the character and judgement to be president during this critical time for our country."
A State Department official noted that the "information we upgraded today was not marked classified at the time the emails were sent," according to Fox News.
