More Hillary Clinton Emails Released, One Describes 'Weirdest Exchange Ever'
— -- Today’s release of over 7,000 pages of Hillary Clinton email marks the halfway point for the State Department, which is attempting to meet a federal court’s mandate to release all 55,000 pages of her email collection by January 2016.
The department has now published roughly 27,000 pages of her emails on its public records website that were once stored on Clinton’s now-infamous private server.
Most of the new email is from within the 2011-2012 time frame, along with some from 2009 and 2010.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said today's tranche contains somewhere between 200 to 300 newly classified emails, meaning those emails will be shielded from public view due to the sensitive nature of their content. He said that none of those emails were marked classified when they were sent, a point Clinton has often reiterated on the campaign trail.
In one potentially controversial email, Clinton tells one of her top aides that the Israelis can be "cocky." She was responding to a an inquiry from a reporter, who used that same word to describe an Israeli delegation that was providing an in-flight readout of a meeting they'd just finished. "They always sound cocky," Clinton wrote, "in the air or on the ground."
Most of the emails available for review online tend to contain more of the same: mundane yet sometimes entertaining communications between Clinton and her aides. In one email, Clinton complained that she no longer has "emoticons" on her new blackberry. The email is titled simply ":-(" -- a sad face emoticon.
In another email, Clinton recounts the "weirdest exchange ever" between a woman who told "Bill" (presumably her husband) that "her father 'circumcised Bin Laden.'"
In July of 2011, Clinton joked with a State Department employee that maybe her email was hacked by the Chinese. In reality, Clinton's campaign has said her email has never been breached, despite claims from her political rivals that her methods were not secure.
Clinton critics have most recently seized on the documents referenced by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, during Clinton’s marathon testimony in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last week. One of them was from Clinton to her daughter Chelsea on the night of the Benghazi attack and suggested that Clinton knew al Qaeda-linked militants were involved from the beginning, rather than unrest stirred up by an anti-Islam video.
Clinton defended her communications that night, testifying to the committee that she wrote those things at the time because militia group Ansar al-Sharia had claimed credit for the attack on social media, only to retract that claim days later.
There were also intelligence assessments indicating the video played a role in the attack.
Clinton's camp declined comment on the latest batch of emails.
