State Department releases thousands of new Clinton emails

The State Department released nearly 4,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of State on Wednesday, part of a long-running government release of the Democratic presidential front-runner’s messages.

Wednesday’s tranche is the department’s fifth major document dump of Clinton emails, following a court order earlier this year in a public-records case.

“It is like a drip, drip, drip,” Clinton said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last weekend. “I have done all that I can to take responsibility, to be as transparent as possible.”

{mosads}The new emails add up to 6,300 pages of Clinton’s communications and cover roughly January of 2010 through October of 2011.

While many of the emails concern mundane features of Clinton’s time in office, some are personally or politically revealing.

A January 2011 email from the height of the Egyptian revolution outlines the Obama administration’s broad efforts to shore up support on Capitol Hill.

Also that month, she asked aides to dig into the claim that the State Department will use “parent one and parent two” instead of “mother and father” on official forms.

“I’m not defending that decision, which I disagree [with] and knew nothing about, in front of this Congress,” she wrote. “I could live [with] letting people in nontraditional families choose another descriptor so long as we retained the presumption of mother and father.”

“We need to address this today or we will be facing a huge Fox-generated media storm led by Palin et al.,” she added, referring to former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

Other emails seem destined to provide fodder for late night talk shows.

In August of 2010, Clinton emailed her staff twice to ask “what the NPR stations I can hear on Long Island are?”

“I lost the WNYC signal half way down the island and can’t figure out from Google what the next stations are,” she wrote.

In February of that year, Clinton complained that she was “fighting” with a White House phone operator “who doesn’t believe I am who I say and wants my direct office line even [though] I’m not there and I just have him my home [number] and the State Dept [number] and I told him I had no idea what my direct office [number] was since I didn’t call myself and I just hung up and am calling thru [Operations] like a proper and properly dependent Secretary of State–no independent dialing allowed.”

The full set of roughly 30,000 emails is due out by January. More than one-third of them have been released so far, including the newest batch.

Those 30,000 emails — which add up to roughly 55,000 pages — are only about half of the total emails Clinton sent and received while in office. She deleted tens of thousands of other emails last year, she said, after determining that they were purely personal in nature, such as discussing yoga sessions and social engagements.

Clinton’s emails have become a political liability for her presidential ambitions. Republicans have been quick to jump on the fact that she used a personal email address routed through a private server based at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., which they say was an effort to hide from the public.

Republicans and transparency advocates have scolded Clinton for her decision to unilaterally decide which emails were personal and which belonged in the hands of the government.  

Last week, the Obama administration said that it had discovered one email chain that Clinton had not handed over. The messages, which involved retired Gen. David Petraeus, were discovered by the Pentagon and handed over to the State Department.

A significant portion of the emails have contained innocuous messages about Clinton’s schedule, broad foreign policy goals and even personal habits such as her favorite TV shows. 

Wednesday’s tranche of emails contained more than 200 that had been marked as classified, including three marked “secret.” 

That doubles the total number of emails now marked as classified that had made their way into Clinton’s inbox. 

However, State Department and other arms of government have debated about some of the classification levels and whether they should have been classified at the time they were sent.

Still, the fact that presumably insightful government plans were not protected by the U.S. government has worried some national security hawks. Many have suspected that Clinton’sserver could have posed an attractive target for foreign intelligence agents.

If a foreign official had used a similar setup, “that would represent opportunity,” National Security Agency head Adm. Michael Rogers testified on Capitol Hill last week.

This story was updated at 6:21 p.m.