Sources: 'Top secrets' unalarming

1 of 2 so-labeled Clinton emails said to be on drone strike

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks during a campaign stop at River Valley Community College Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2015, in Claremont, N.H.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks during a campaign stop at River Valley Community College Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2015, in Claremont, N.H.

WASHINGTON -- Neither of the two emails sent to Hillary Rodham Clinton now labeled by intelligence agencies as "top secret" contained information that would jump out to experts as particularly sensitive, according to several government officials.

One included a discussion of a U.S. drone strike, part of a covert program that is widely known and discussed. A second conversation could have improperly referred to highly classified material, but it also could have reflected information collected independently, U.S. officials who have reviewed the correspondence said.

Clinton, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, agreed this week to turn over to the FBI the private server she used as secretary of state. Republicans in Congress have seized on the involvement of federal law enforcement in the matter as a sign she was negligent in handling the nation's secrets.

On Monday, the inspector general for the 17 spy agencies that make up what is known as the intelligence community told Congress that two of 40 emails, in a random sample of 30,000 messages that Clinton gave the State Department for review, contained information deemed "top secret," one of the government's highest levels of classification.

While neither of the emails was marked classified at the time they were sent, they have since been given a "TK" marking, for "talent keyhole," suggesting material obtained by spy satellites. And they also were marked "NOFORN," meaning information that can only be shared with U.S. authorities with security clearances.

The two emails got those markings after consultations with the CIA and other agencies where the material originated, officials said. Some officials said they believed that the designations were a stretch -- a knee-jerk move in a bureaucracy rife with overclassification.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, work in intelligence and other agencies. They wouldn't detail the full contents of the emails because of ongoing questions about classification level.

Clinton didn't transmit the sensitive information herself, they said, and nothing in the emails she received makes direct reference to communications intercepts, confidential intelligence methods or any other form of sensitive sourcing.

The drone exchange, the officials said, begins with a copy of a news article about the CIA drone program that targets terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere. While that program is technically top secret, it is well-known and often reported on. Former CIA director Leon Panetta and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have openly discussed it.

But a second email reviewed by Charles McCullough, the intelligence community inspector general, appears more problematic, officials said. Nothing in the message is "lifted" from classified documents, they said, though they differed on where the information in it was sourced. Some said it improperly points back to highly classified material, while others countered that it was a classic case of what the government calls "parallel reporting" -- receiving information the government considers secret through "open source" channels.

Meanwhile, another U.S. official said the FBI is seeking to determine in its investigation whether data from Clinton's server may still exist elsewhere.

After acquiring the server Wednesday, agents are attempting to determine whether emails may have been backed up on another machine, said the official, who asked for anonymity.

Barbara Wells, an attorney for Platte River Networks, a Denver-based company that has managed Clinton's private email since 2013, said in a phone interview Thursday that the server turned over to the FBI "is blank and does not contain any useful data."

But Wells added that the data on Clinton's server was migrated to another server that still exists. She ended the interview when questioned further, declining to say whether the data still exists on that other server and who has possession of it.

"The data on the old server is not now available on any server or device that is under Platte River's control," Wells said.

Subsequent calls and emails to Wells and the Clinton campaign went unanswered.

Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush declined in an email to comment on whether the department is aware of the other server and trying to access it.

The issue over the now-classified emails came to light Tuesday after Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said McCullough found four "highly classified" emails on the unusual private server that Clinton used while she was secretary of state. Two were sent back to the State Department for review, but Grassley said the other two were classified at the closely guarded "top secret/SCI level." SCI stands for "sensitive compartmented information."

Clinton said she exchanged about 60,000 emails in her four years as secretary of state. She turned over all but what she said were personal emails late last year.

The department has been making those public after scrubbing sensitive material.

The State Department advised employees not to use personal email accounts for work, but it wasn't prohibited.

Information for this article was contributed by Bradley Klapper, Ken Dilanian, Stephen Braun and Eric Tucker of The Associated Press and by Chris Strohm and Del Quentin Wilber of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 08/15/2015

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