Hillary Clinton Emails: Thousands Of New Pages Released

 Thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails while US secretary of state have been released, including many that have been censored after being deemed classified.

Mrs Clinton, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2016 presidential election, has been under fire for using a private computer server for work emails while in office.

But she says no classified information was sent or received.

But some 150 emails were deemed confidential by the State Department.

Mrs Clinton’s opponents have accused her of putting US security at risk by using an unsecured computer system.

The presidential hopeful has admitted that her decision to use a private email server at her New York home was a mistake.

She served as Secretary of State in 2009-13.

Ratings affected
The emails – the details of which were found among more than 7,000 pages of her correspondence released by the department late on Monday – were partly censored.

The State Department said about 150 of the messages had to be censored because they contained information considered to be classified.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner was quoted by AFP as saying the process of re-evaluating the remaining unreleased emails was continuing.

However, the vast majority of the correspondence concerned mundane matters of daily life at workplace, including phone messages and relays of daily schedules.

Associated Press says the emails revealed that Mrs Clinton and her aides were acutely aware of the need to protect sensitive information.

More than a quarter of Mrs Clinton’s work emails have now been released, after she provided the State Department with 30,000 pages of documents last year.

Polls indicate that the email scandal has affected Mrs Clinton’s ratings, though she remains the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

Why did she do it?
Mrs Clinton says the primary reason she set up her own email was for “convenience” but sceptics say the real reason she did it was because it gave her total control over her correspondence.

How many emails?
According to Mrs Clinton, she sent or received 62,320 emails during her time as secretary of state – she says half of them were official and have been turned over to the State Department.

Was it illegal?

Probably not. Mrs Clinton’s email system existed in a grey area of the law – and one that has been changed several times since she left office.

Why the controversy?

It’s a big deal because Mrs Clinton is asking the US public to trust that she is complying with both the “letter and the spirit of the rules”. Critics on the left and the right are concerned she made her communications on sensitive national security issues more susceptible to hackers and foreign intelligence services.