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.
However, 125 emails were deemed confidential by the State Department.
The
State Department disclosed that Mrs Clinton used a private server
during her time as Secretary of State (2009-13) after journalists
requested copies of her government emails.
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 State Department released 4,368 emails - totalling 7,121 pages - late on Monday.
It said about 150 of the messages had to be censored because they contained information considered to be classified.
One
of the emails - sent in November 2013 by Mrs Clinton's then foreign
policy adviser Jacob Sullivan - was published heavily redacted and
marked classified until 2025.
Mr Sullivan, who is now a policy
adviser for Mrs Clinton's presidential campaign, forwarded her boss the
email with the subject line: "No go on Burma (Myanmar) travel."
In
another email - from September 2010 - Britain's David Miliband admitted
that losing the Labour leadership race to Ed Miliband was "tough",
adding: "When it's your brother..."
State Department spokesman
Mark Toner was quoted by AFP as saying the process of re-evaluating the
remaining unreleased emails was continuing.
The emails were not
marked as classified at the time Mrs Clinton sent or received them. The
vast majority of the correspondence concerned mundane matters of daily
life at workplace, including phone messages and relays of daily
schedules.
One particular email eliciting laughs among the US
political reporter set is an email about Gefilte fish, a traditional
Jewish food eaten on the holiday Passover.
Image caption
The emails often discussed mundane or non-urgent matters
The Washington Post explains
that the Gefilte fish email was about a shipment of the product to
Israel from the US Mrs Clinton was trying to save from a high tax.
Many
of the emails show the influence of Sidney Blumenthal, an outside
Clinton adviser. In one email, Mr Blumenthal describes former UK Liberal
Democrat leader Nick Clegg as having "misplayed almost every turn" and
being full of "inbred arrogance."
Associated Press says the
emails revealed that Mrs Clinton and her aides were acutely aware of the
need to protect sensitive information.
It says Mrs Clinton also
expressed frustration with the State Department's treatment of certain
ordinary documents as classified.
In one email, a State Department IT staffer is trying to determine why Mrs Clinton's non-governmental email is bouncing back.
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.
Analysis: Anthony Zurcher, BBC North America Reporter
At
this point the novelty of peering into Hillary Clinton's email
correspondence is starting to wear off for the general public. Although
the former secretary of state's attempts to explain why she used of a
private email server have damaged her political standing, the steady
release of her electronic missives has faded into the background noise
of the presidential campaign.
There may yet be some scandalous
message lurking in the trove of yet-to-be-released messages, but given
the fact that the files were screened by Mrs Clinton or her staff, that
seems unlikely.
Image caption
Hillary says she set up the private server for "convenience"
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.
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