The US State Department on Saturday provided more details about a 2011 document at the center of US Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton’s latest e-mail controversy, as an official said the former US secretary of state never received the paper by non-secure fax. However, many other questions remained unanswered.
Clinton, whose presidential campaign has been challenged by her use of a private e-mail account while secretary of state, is facing new questions after Friday’s revelation that she asked an adviser to go around a secure fax system to transmit a set of “talking points” on an unspecified subject.
Clinton told the adviser to turn it “into nonpaper w/no identifying heading and send nonsecure.” Republicans pounced on the exchange and suggested it proved impropriety.
The State Department on Friday said that no such document was sent by e-mail.
And on Saturday, a State Department official who was not authorized to speak publicly on the increasingly complicated review of Clinton’s e-mails said the agency “checked its records and found no indication that the document in question was sent to Secretary Clinton using non-secure fax or e-mail.”
The official, who demanded anonymity, said records instead turned up a secure fax transmission shortly after Clinton’s e-mail exchange with adviser Jake Sullivan on June 17, 2011. The implication was that this was the same document.
While the review appears to rule out the possibility of Clinton improperly receiving sensitive material, it leaves other questions unanswered.
Was the document classified or unclassified? The State Department will not say.
And was Clinton wrong to instruct a senior aide to send it through non-secure means, even if that request was not fulfilled? The department says it is not making a judgment.
Even the document’s subject matter has not been revealed.
The only indication in the e-mail exchange of what the document might have been about was redacted in Friday’s release of some 3,000 pages from Clinton’s tenure as the US’ top diplomat.
It is unclear if any copy of the secure fax remains.
“Nonpaper” refers to an informal document, without official markings like a letterhead or logos, not saved for records.
The Clinton campaign said she had handled information appropriately.
“It is false that Hillary Clinton asked for classified material to be sent on a non-secure system,” campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said.
Since Clinton’s use of a private e-mail account and server became known last year, Republicans and others have questioned if the Democratic frontrunner, either actively or passively, mishandled classified or otherwise sensitive material.
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, the Judiciary Committee chairman, on Friday called the exchange with Sullivan a “disturbing e-mail” that appears to show Clinton instructing an aide “to remove the headings from a classified document and send it to her in an unsecure manner.”
He said Clinton “needs to finally come clean and be transparent about the e-mail practices she used during her tenure at the department.”
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