State Dept releases Clinton emails

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks in Cleveland

The State Department made public roughly 7,121 pages of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails late Monday night (yesterday, Macau time), including 125 emails that were censored prior to their release because they contain information now deemed classified. The vast majority concerned mundane matters of daily life at any workplace: phone messages, relays of schedules and forwards of news articles.
Clinton and her aides at the State Department were acutely aware of the need to protect sensitive information when discussing international affairs over email and other forms of unsecure electronic communication, according to the latest batch of messages released by the agency from Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
But in a few of the emails, Clinton and her aides noted the constraints of discussing sensitive subjects when working outside of the government’s secure messaging systems — and the need to protect such information.
Senior adviser Alec Ross, in a February 2010 email intended for Clinton, cited frustration with “the boundaries of unclassified email” in a message about an unspecified country, which Ross referred to as “the country we discussed.” The email appears to focus on civil unrest in Iran during the period preceding the Green Movement, when Iranian protesters used social media and the Internet to unsuccessfully challenge the re-election of then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
In an exchange from Feb. 6, 2010, Clinton asks aide Huma Abedin for talking points for a call she’s about to have with the newly appointed foreign minister of Ecuador. “You are congratulating him on becoming foreign minister, and purpose is to establish a personal relationship with him,” Abedin replied. “Trying to get u call sheet, its classified….”
In another email from January 2010, Clinton aide Cheryl Mills responds angrily to a New York Times story based on leaked classified cables sent by Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. “The leaking of classified material is a breach not only of trust, it is also a breach of the law,” Mills wrote.
Clinton also expressed frustration with the State Department’s treatment of certain ordinary documents as classified. After an aide noted the draft of innocuous remarks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was on the State Department’s classified messaging system, she responded, “It’s a public statement! Just email it.”
Sent a moment later, the statement merely said that U.S. and British officials would work together to promote peace. “Well that is certainly worthy of being top secret,” Clinton responded sarcastically.
All those emails conversations with Clinton took place via her private email account, highlighting the challenge the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination faces as she struggles to explain her decision to set-up a private email server at her New York home. She now says her decision to use a personal email account to conduct government business was a mistake. Lisa Lerer and Matthew Lee, Washington , AP