Hillary Clinton deleted an email she sent to her daughter Chelsea in 2009, a new batch of email messages released by the State Department shows. State released 285 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails on Friday as part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act request.
The email chain in question contained information that was upgraded to the confidential level of classification when it was released about a year ago.
The Dec. 20, 2009 email chain, entitled “Update,” started with a message from Michael Froman, who served as a deputy assistant to President Obama and deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs.
The email, which is redacted because it contains information classified as “Confidential,” was sent to Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s foreign policy adviser at the State Department, and several Obama aides. Sullivan sent it to Hillary Clinton who then forwarded it to Chelsea, who emailed under the pseudonym “Diane Reynolds.”
All of the text in the body portion of the classified emails is redacted because it contains foreign government information.
The State Department labeled the email a “near duplicate,” indicating that it was mostly similar to other emails that the agency has released from the trove of emails that Clinton turned over in Dec. 2014.
State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters Friday that the “upgrade” to confidential didn’t address whether the email should have been sent in a non-classified setting.
“The portion of this email that was upgraded was provided to the Department by former Secretary Clinton back in December 2014,” Kirby said. “It was upgraded to confidential – the lowest level of classification – and released in October 2015 during our regular productions of approximately 52,000 pages of former Secretary Clinton’s emails. As to whether emails were classified at the time they were sent, the State Department in the [Freedom of Information Act] process is focusing on whether information needs to be protected today.”
Clinton did not delete her responses to the others on the email thread — just her response to Chelsea, who is a private citizen with no apparent security clearance to be reading classified emails.
She handed over 30,490 “work-related” emails (over 50,000 printed pages) to the State Department in December of 2014. It is not known when exactly she deleted her “private” emails, but it is presumed to have been around the same time frame.
FBI Director James Comey announced in July that investigators recovered several thousand work-related emails that were not in the group that was returned to State by Clinton in 2014. The emails released Friday are from that trove.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member