Some of the 22 emails found on Hillary Clinton's private unsecured server that were too damaging to publicly release contained "operational intelligence," such as the names of CIA officers and informants living overseas, unnamed intelligence officials told Fox News.
After viewing the highly classified documents, the source said that the presence of the information on Clinton's home email server, which was almost certainly accessed by multiple foreign governments and hackers, jeopardized "sources, methods and lives."
"It's a death sentence," a senior intelligence community official told the Observer. "If we're lucky only (foreign) agents, not our officers, will get killed because of this."
The State Department confirmed for the first time Friday that Clinton's server contained information classified as "top secret." The communications were so sensitive that the administration refused to release it publicly, even in redacted form, reported the Associated Press.
"The documents are being upgraded at the request of the intelligence community because they contain a category of top secret information," State Department spokesman John Kirby said Friday.
When Clinton started serving as secretary of state in 2009, rather than using the government-issued email account, she set up a server and account in her New York home, but didn't properly secure it to handle classified information. Her tenure ended in 2013 and before turning over work-related emails for federal record-keeping purposes, she deleted 30,000 emails that she unilaterally deemed personal in nature.
"I'll spend the rest of my career trying to figure out what classified information was in those (deleted emails)," a Pentagon counterintelligence official told the Observer. "Everybody is mad as hell right now."
"The worst part," he added, "is that Moscow and Beijing have that information but the Intelligence Community maybe never will."
The FBI is conducting an investigation into Clinton's arrangement to determine whether she knowingly transmitted classified information. Clinton insists that she never sent or received anything that was marked as classified.
She continued to dismiss the controversy Monday, suggesting that Republicans are politicizing it to hurt her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
"I can tell you that is not on the minds of the literally thousands of people that I've seen in the last few weeks. I'm glad it isn't," Clinton told CNN. "The facts are the facts and no matter how much selective leaking or anonymous sourcing... that goes on, what people want to know is what I can do to be the best possible president for them and families."
