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 The department has been regularly releasing batches of her work
emails in keeping with a judge's order. But Monday's release of the
final 1,700 messages does not end the controversy and legal
uncertainty dogging Clinton's Democratic presidential campaign since
her use of a private email server came to light a year ago.
Republican rivals in the battle for the Nov. 8 election have cited
the email controversy in saying Clinton, the Democratic
front-runner, is unfit for the presidency.
Clinton, secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, has said her email
arrangement broke no rules and that she will be vindicated.
One of the newly released exchanges shows Clinton and Jake Sullivan,
one of her closest aides, in a discussion now entirely censored as
"secret," the second-highest level in the government's three-tier
classification system.
The messages, sent on June 7, 2012, bear the subject "Khar - where
we are" - likely a reference to Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan's
foreign minister. The previous day, Pakistan had renewed its
insistence that the United States apologize for an air attack that
killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.
 All told, classified information appears in 2,093 of the 30,300 work
emails and attachments Clinton's lawyers returned to the department
in 2014, including 261 such emails released on Monday. That
information is obscured with white boxes in the public copies.
The government forbids sending or storing classified information
outside secure, government-controlled channels. The FBI has taken
the server and is investigating with U.S. Justice Department
attorneys whether laws were broken through the unusual arrangement.
The State Department's inspector general and at least two
Republican-led congressional committees are conducting similar
inquiries.
The State Department is investigating how much of the information in
the more than 2,000 emails marked as classified was classified at
the time they were sent. The vast majority of those messages - 2,028
- contain information classified at the "confidential" level, the
lowest, including scores sent by Clinton herself.
A further 65 contain "secret" information, including at least one
written by Clinton, while 22 contain "top-secret" information from
U.S. intelligence agencies, which have been entirely withheld from
release.
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FIGHT FOR ACCESS
Members of the public are still fighting the department in court for
access to thousands of public records connected to some of Clinton's
closest aides. Last week, a federal judge granted a request by a
conservative group suing the State Department under open records
laws to seek sworn testimony from department officials and Clinton
aides to see if the arrangement was intended to thwart public access
to government records.
Clinton's staff has accused the government of overclassifying, and
attribute the large number of emails now marked as classified to an
"interagency" dispute between the State Department and intelligence
agencies.
At most, only a few dozen of the 2,000 classified emails included
information from intelligence agencies, according to several people
familiar with those agencies' analyses of the emails. The vast
majority of the classified information originated with State
Department ambassadors and employees, including Clinton herself.
State Department lawyers told a federal judge last week they still
did not know who in the government authorized Clinton's email
arrangement or why. Clinton has said the arrangement was for her
convenience, but that she now regrets it.
The Justice Department, seeking to rebut suggestions that President
Barack Obama's administration may have inappropriate influence on
its investigation, has not briefed the White House on its progress,
Attorney General Loretta Lynch said on Monday.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball
and Idrees Ali; Editing by Andrea Ricci and Peter Cooney)
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