At least four emails Hillary Clinton kept on a private server during her years as Secretary of State were classified “secret” at the time, according to an inspector general review — a finding that calls into question her assertion in March that she took care to avoid sending classified materials. 
 
 However, suggestions from Clinton aides that she didn’t knowingly keep classified information on the private account still have some life. So far, it appears none of the information was marked as classified before it moved into or out of her home-cooked email system, but that caveat has not stemmed Republican complaints that it was reckless for her to handle her sensitive work on a private system. 
 
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 “None of the emails we reviewed had classification or dissemination markings, but some included [Intelligence Community]-derived classified information and should have been handled and transmitted via a secure network,” Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III said in a letter to congressional committee leaders Thursday. 
 
 McCullough said a limited sample of just 40 emails “revealed four contained classified IC information that should have been marked and handled at the SECRET level” — the middle of three broad tiers of classification. The claim became public as McCullough disclosed to Congress that he had advised the FBI of a potential “compromise” of classified information in the Clinton email episode —a referral that could lead to a criminal investigation. 
 
 It’s a violation of federal law for a government official to “knowingly” move “materials containing classified information” to “an unauthorized location.” 
 
 Soon after it was revealed in March that Clinton used a private server to handle her work-related email as secretary, she insisted at a press conference that there was no need for concern about classified information. 
 
 “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” she said. “There is no classified material. So, I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.” 
 
 McCullough’s letter does not allege specifically that Clinton sent classified information from her private account. While it is possible she only received it, the inspector general said the State Department believes “there are potentially hundreds of classified emails within the approximately 30,000 provided by former Secretary Clinton.” 
 
 Clinton addressed the new reports briefly Friday, but she did not reiterate her claim that nothing on her server was classified. 
 
 “I want to say a word about what’s in the news today. It’s because there have been a lot of inaccuracies….Maybe the heat is getting to everybody,” the Democratic presidential candidate said as she began a speech on economic policy in New York City. “We all have a responsibility to get this right. I have released 55,000 pages of emails. I have said repeatedly that i will answer questions before the house [Benghazi] committee. We are all accountable to get the facts right. I will do my part, but I’m also going to stay focused on the issues, particularly the big issues that really matter to American families.” 
 
 Clinton handed over a trove of business-related emails to the department in December, generating controversy after she said she and her attorney had destroyed any emails that they deemed personal in nature. 
 
 A lengthy review ensued to screen for classified material before public release. In May, when the agency released the first batch of Clinton emails, it said it had designated a portion of one email as secret at the request of the FBI. When a second, larger batch was released last month, State deemed 25 of the emails “confidential” — the lowest tier of classification. 
 
 However, McCullough’s finding is notable because he is asserting that at least some of the information was classified at the time it was sent, although he did not say whether Clinton sent or only received such emails. All of the emails released thus far are at least a couple of years old and State officials had insisted that some of the materials could have become more sensitive over time, resulting in a change to their classification. 
 
 McCullough spokeswoman Andrea Williams said Friday that was, in fact, not the case. “To be clear – the four emails mentioned…were classified when they were sent and are classified now,” she said. 
 
 However, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Friday his agency remained unconvinced that any of Clinton’s emails should have been considered classified when they were sent. “To our knowledge, none of them needed to be classified at the time,” Toner told reporters at a daily briefing. 
 
 Still, the question of what information on Clinton’s account is and isn’t classified and what its status was at the time, remains a subject of some dispute. 
 
 McCullough said in the letter that he found that one of State’s public releases of emails in recent months under the Freedom of Information Act resulted in disclosure of classified information. While the inspector general said the intelligence community had made “a definitive determination” that the information was classified, State has continued to deny that any breaches occurred when the agency posted several thousand pages of Clinton emails on its website in May and June. 
 
 Other documents made public Friday show the classification issue triggered debate even within the agency. Some at State wanted to deem even more of Clinton’s emails classified than the agency ultimately did, according to a memo from McCullough’s office posted online by the department’s inspector general. 
 
 In at least four instances, lawyers at Foggy Bottom headed off the classifications by proposing another way to keep the information from the public, the document said. 
 
 For Clinton, the previously-undisclosed changes minimized the public relations hit she took with the May email release. Instead of stories saying five emails in that Libya-related set were classified, news accounts noted that a single email out of the 296 released was withheld on national security grounds. 
 
 Clinton’s decision to use a private server for all of her government and personal emails has been a continuing political controversy for her, seized on by Republicans as evidence that she violated government guidelines. 
 
 However, the new disclosures also underscore the subjective nature of the classification system and could be seen as supporting Clinton’s claim that she had no reason to believe any of the information on her personal account was classified. 
 
 “State Department FOIA personnel recommended five B1 (Classified National Security Information) FOIA exemptions for proposed redactions in the first set of 296 emails to protect classified information. According to State FOIA personnel, during the State Department Legal Office’s review, four of the Bl exemptions were removed and changed to B5 FOIA exemptions (Privileged Communications),” a June 15 memo from the Intelligence Community inspector general said. 
 
 The decision to deem the records legally privileged as internal government communications, rather than classified, allowed the information to be deleted from the FOIA records posted on State’s website. However, the move also minimized the degree to which Clinton appeared to have mishandled the records. In addition, the shift minimized the appearance that the State Department itself did something wrong when it sent the 296 emails to the House Benghazi Committee without designating any of them as classified. 
 
 Whatever public relations benefit Clinton or State got from the maneuver was short-lived: when State released another batch of Clinton emails at the end of June, 25 more were deemed classified. 
 
 With a criminal investigation into the presence of classified information in the Clinton emails now potentially looming, the internal waffling at State on the classification issue does offer another benefit for Clinton and those who corresponded with her. It underscores why prosecutors so rarely bring charges over mishandling of classified information—especially when it is not explicitly marked as such. 
 
 Deeming emails classified years after they were sent creates due process problems that could doom any such prosecution. However, to Republican lawmakers and some voters, the episode could still reinforce the view that Clinton showed poor judgment by relying on a private email account.. 
 
 Since State first deemed some of the information classified two months ago, her aides have said she had no reason to think the information was classified at the time she received it. Indeed, some—but not all—of the emails State deemed classified were explicitly marked as “sensitive but unclassified.” 
 
 After the New York Times reported the criminal referral from the inspectors generals, Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill issued a statement early Friday that Clinton “followed appropriate practices in dealing with classified materials.” 
 
 “As has been reported on multiple occasions, any released emails deemed classified by the administration have been done so after the fact, and not at the time they were transmitted,” Merrill added. 
 
 Asked Friday about the reason State backed off some of the proposed classifications, a State spokesman pointed to a July 14 memo from Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy. In it, he said that two of the four emails were in relevant part duplicates and that the potential classification was proposed by State’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. 
 
 “NEA consulted with the Office of the Legal Adviser regarding FOIA exemptions that were potentially available,” Kennedy wrote. “NEA decided, consistent with the Attorney General’s 2009 FOIA guidance, to redact certain limited information under exemption 5 which reflected deliberations among policy officials.” 
 
 Kennedy also disclosed that one email relating to the Department of Defense was proposed for classification, but the Pentagon decided not to pursue it. As a result the only email in the first, Libya-related batch to be deemed classified dealt with the reported arrests of suspects in the Benghazi attack, classified at the FBI’s request. 
 
 One prominent classification expert said the back-and-forth underscores the arbitrariness and subjectivity of the classification system. 
 
 “Classification decisions are matters of judgment, not calculation,” said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. “It is entirely possible for two senior officials to disagree about the need for classifying a particular item of information.” ||||| Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said he suspected that if there had been no fuss and a researcher or journalist had sought all of Mrs. Clinton’s emails under the Freedom of Information Act, the answer might have been different. 
 
 “It would have been a real surprise if none of it was withheld on the grounds of classification,” Mr. Aftergood said. To start with, he said, “they’d have to say there’s no ‘foreign government information’ in the chief diplomat’s email.” 
 
 But Mr. Aftergood also noted that as secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton was the top classification authority for the entire State Department, with broad discretion to determine which department documents were classified and which were not. “There’s zero chance that she’ll be charged with unauthorized retention of classified information, because she decides what’s classified,” he said. 
 
 Clinton aides pointed out other factors that reduced the need to use the personal email account for sensitive matters. As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton was almost always accompanied by one or more aides with secure government BlackBerrys, laptops or other devices that could be used to send classified material at her direction. 
 
 “Classified information was viewed in hard copy by the secretary while in the office,” according to a statement from her office Tuesday. “While on travel, the department had rigorous protocols for her and traveling staff to receive and transmit information of all types.” 
 
 Her office said that while serving as secretary, Ms. Clinton “communicated with foreign officials in person, through correspondence and by telephone.” Her staff’s review of her emails “revealed only one email with a foreign official,” one from the United Kingdom, the statement said. 
 
 It is rare but not unheard-of for a government official to be punished for storing classified information on a personal device. John M. Deutch, a former C.I.A. director, was pardoned by President Bill Clinton in 2001, sparing him a guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge for keeping classified information on personal, nongovernment computers. Mr. Deutch had already been stripped of his security clearance. ||||| AP Photo Clinton’s email woes deepen as classified messages pile up The number of emails now marked classified doubled with the latest release. 
 
 The controversy over Hillary Clinton's use of personal email while she was secretary of state is showing no signs of easing, as the number of messages now deemed classified doubled with the State Department's latest release and as more details emerged about the potential vulnerability of her account. 
 
 The number of emails now considered classified total more than 400, with three of the 215 newly classified documents marked as SECRET — the middle tier of the national security classification system. While Clinton has maintained that she never received or forwarded messages that were marked classified at the time, critics have argued that the use of a private email account and server put her in a precarious position when dealing with sensitive materials. 
 
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 In another blow to the Clinton campaign's "nothing to see here" narrative, the latest release shows that hackers targeted her personal email at least five times in August 2011, as part of a widespread speeding ticket hoax. It's not clear if Clinton ever clicked on what appeared to be virus-laden attachments that security experts say seem to have originated in Russia. Clinton and her surrogates have argued there is no evidence her "home brew" email system was ever compromised. 
 
 Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill maintained that stance Wednesday. “We have no evidence to suggest she replied to this email nor that she clicked on the attachment,” Merrill said. “As we have said before, there is no evidence that the system was ever breached. All these emails show is that, like millions of other Americans, she received spam." 
 
 The latest release of roughly 6,300 more pages of emails is just the latest installment of a prolonged disclosure process that has proved to be painful for Clinton's presidential campaign. The roiling controversy has opened up the Democratic front-runner to accusations that she was trying to dodge public records rules and that she put sensitive material at risk — allegations Clinton denies. 
 
 Wednesday's release marks the first time the State Department itself has deemed messages in Clinton's account to warrant protection at the SECRET level — the middle tier of the national security classification system. State earlier classified one Benghazi-related message SECRET, but did so at the request of the FBI. 
 
 Two of the just-released SECRET emails pertain to talks about the Iranian nuclear program, conducted by a group of nations referred to as the P5+1. The messages are from January 21 and 22, 2011 and were forwarded to Clinton's private account by Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan, who now serves as policy director on Clinton's presidential campaign. 
 
 The substance of the two emails was redacted from the public release, but the subject lines identify the messages as summaries of the nuclear talks underway in Istanbul, Turkey. A State Department spokesman said that message, and the others deemed classified, were not marked as such when they were sent to Sullivan by other State officials. 
 
 Republicans and some security experts have said the forwarding of such sensitive messages to Clinton's private account risked national security and made them vulnerable to interception and hacking. Aides to Clinton's presidential campaign have argued that classified messages are not supposed to be on unclassified systems, either in or out of government, so the former secretary's reliance on a private account is irrelevant to that issue. 
 
 The other message deemed "SECRET" in Wednesday's release is only classified in a technical sense. The document, forwarded to Clinton by Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, is a transcript of a June 15, 2008 Mideast peace negotiating session between the U.S., Israel and Palestinian officials. The transcript was obtained from anonymous sources by Al Jazeera in 2011 and published on the news outlet's website. 
 
 It appears Abedin, now the vice chairwoman of Clinton's campaign, got the transcript from State officials who downloaded it off the Internet and were debating how to respond to the leak. The decision to later classify the document may reflect the fact that the U.S. government has never formally acknowledged the accuracy of the slew of Mideast peace process-related documents Al Jazeera posted. 
 
 “I’m not going to comment on alleged leaked documents,” a State official said Wednesday. “These are not U.S. documents and I will not comment on their veracity. As we have produced this document using the FOIA standards, it is our responsibility to protect potentially sensitive information.” 
 
 The newest set of emails, bringing the total number of pages released to more than 19,500, largely cover the period between early 2010 and October 2011, days before the death of Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi. State is keeping to its prior practice of releasing emails from Clinton's account in rough chronological order, exceeding its September goal of producing 37 percent of the entire trove. 
 
 Among the topics covered in the new batch: the response to the earthquake disaster in Haiti, the Arab Spring democracy movement, the build-up and the NATO intervention in Libya and the disclosure of tens of thousands of classified diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks. 
 
 "DOD still in denial over their lapses, and their tendency to lowball damage in public is really unhelpful," deputy Secretary William Burns wrote in an email to Sullivan about the WikiLeaks fiasco, which he forwarded on to Clinton in early December 2010. 
 
 When Tunisia overthrew longtime President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in early January 2011, the first domino to fall in the Arab Spring, Clinton and her aides corresponded over intelligence and media coverage. 
 
 "Did you see the front page Post story on Tunisia today? The reference to you - your trip and your statement - was exactly what we were going for," Sullivan wrote on Jan. 15, 2011. 
 
 As unrest grew in Egypt later that month, Clinton wrote Sullivan and Abedin early one Sunday morning, asking if they had any overnight reports. "Just got one at 7:40 and sent [to] you," Abedin responded. 
 
 That October in Libya, as rebels closed in on Gadhafi, Abedin kept Clinton informed of developments. In the most recent email released Wednesday, Abedin shared a Reuters article from Oct. 16, 2011, which reported that interim government forces had raised Libya's new flag over a Gadhafi stronghold, four days before the dictator was killed. 
 
 Another message foreshadowed the risks of American personnel in hostile territories. 
 
 In 2011, Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills forwarded Clinton an email from Robert Ford, the U.S. ambassador to Syria, recounting an incident where American personnel were at "real risk of serious bodily harm." 
 
 Other messages revealed moments of confusion about email addresses and contact information, including talk from Mills about attempts to hack her email and chatter about how often top State Deparment officials used home email accounts. 
 
 In one email chain from June 2011, adviser Anne-Marie Slaughter suggested that Clinton or someone at State send a message to Congress about the agency's outdated technology by publicly raising the fact that high-level officials were regularly using personal email accounts to do business because the official systems were so dysfunctional. 
 
 "I think this makes good sense," Clinton wrote. 
 
 However, Mills shot down the suggestion, writing, "I am not sure we want to telegraph how much folks do or don't do off state mail b/c it may encourage others who are out there." She also said she was writing the email "as someone who attempted to be hacked (yes I was one)." 
 
 Slaughter responded, saying that a better approach might be to do it more quietly with lawmakers through Clinton. 
 
 In another July 2011 email chain from Clinton to Nora Toiv, Mills' assistant, the secretary appeared confused about whether she had Toiv's State or Gmail address. 
 
 "You've always emailed me on my State email which is toivnf@state.gov," Toiv wrote. 
 
 "Even weirder--I just checked and I do have your state but not your gmail--so how did that happen. Must be the Chinese!" Clinton responded. 
 
 However, these new messages did not appear to shed light on other aspects of the email mess that have been politically problematic, such as Clinton's decision to delete about 30,000 emails when she returned roughly 32,000 others to State last December. Clinton has said she did that after her lawyers determined the messages to be erased were entirely personal in nature. 
 
 Republican lawmakers have questioned how those decisions were made. The FBI, which is investigating whether the use of the private account resulted in a breach of classified information or hacking by a foreign government, has reportedly been successful at recovering some of the deleted emails. Conservative groups suing for Clinton's records under the Freedom of Information Act have asked that the FBI be forced to turn over any emails it does recover to the State Department. 
 
 Clinton's aides have insisted her campaign is still on track, but she conceded in an interview this week that the email controversy is a headache that she hasn't been able to shake. 
 
 "It is like a drip, drip, drip," Clinton said Sunday on NBC's "Meet The Press." "There's only so much that I can control....The Justice Department has the emails, they have the server, they're conducting a security inquiry. They will take whatever necessary steps are required to get this matter resolved." 
 
 Clinton also stood by her claim she used the private account for convenience and flatly rejected suggestions it was set up to make her communications harder for Republicans or FOIA requesters to lay their hands on. 
 
 "It's totally ridiculous. That never crossed my mind," she said. 
 
 Despite the release Wednesday, State's effort to make public the trove of Clinton emails—a project carried out month-by-month in response to a federal judge's order in a FOIA case—is only a little more than one-third complete. More releases are scheduled monthly from October through January, when the first caucusing and voting for the Democratic presidential nomination gets underway. 
 
 Last week, State sent the House Benghazi Committee more than 900 emails relating to Libya that were not included in a batch of about 300 emails provided to the panel in February. However, while the nearly 300 Benghazi-related emails were the first ones State made public in May, the newly-delivered batch is not being prioritized for public release. So those messages will be scattered through the remaining batches to be posted on State's website, a State official said. 
 
 The vast majority of the more than 400 messages deemed classified in the public releases thus far have been designated as "CONFIDENTIAL," the lowest tier of protection for classified information and one applied to foreign government information or diplomatic communications. 
 
 Intelligence agencies have said several other messsages in Clinton's account contained more highly classified information, including at least two messages classified "TOP SECRET" or higher. State has disputed that assertion, arguing that the information was developed from sources the intelligence community may be unaware of. 
 
 When the controversy over Clinton's private email account erupted in March, she said she'd turned over about 55,000 pages of messages to State in December. State now says the count was just over 54,000 pages. After a review by Clinton's former agency and the National Archives, about 1,500 pages have been deemed wholly personal and therefore not agency records subject to the Freedom of Information Act. That leaves about 52,500 pages processed for release or awaiting release. 
 
 Clinton's attorney has asked that the roughly 1,500 pages deemed personal be returned but there's no indication that has happened. 
 
 While legal jockeying continues over Clinton's emails, the sprawling litigation has now spread to thousands of messages turned over to State by her top aides in recent months in response to similar requests State made for work-related messages in their custody. State has said it has no plans to release the full collection of the staffers' messages, but is searching them in response to FOIA requests and lawsuits.
– Hillary Clinton may say she never sent any classified information using her personal email account, but experts and former government officials aren't so sure. As the New York Times reports, both Democrats and Republicans believe the government tends to err on the side of "overclassification" when it comes to making documents secret—more than 80 million documents were classified in 2013—making it difficult to believe that Clinton somehow managed to avoid sending information considered sensitive. "As a longtime critic of the government's massive overclassification, I thought it was a refreshing touch that the secretary of state conducted all her email in unclassified form," says the director of George Washington University's National Security Archive with what the Times calls "a hint of sarcasm." Clinton's staff has identified more than 30,000 emails as pertaining to government business, and a former senior State Department official says it's "hard to imagine" none of those were classified. By his estimate, he says, “I would assume that more than 50% of what the secretary of state dealt with was classified." And another expert notes that, had a journalist made a FOIA request for all of Clinton's email before news of her personal account broke, "it would have been a real surprise if none of it was withheld on the grounds of classification." But, he adds, "there's zero chance that she'll be charged with unauthorized retention of classified information, because she decides what's classified." Clinton also traveled with aides who could have sent classified material from their accounts on her behalf. Politico reports that about 900 pages of emails relating to Benghazi will be released soon.