Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Wednesday dismissed a new report that she sent “a high level of classified material” over the private email server she used exclusively during her tenure as secretary of state.
Clinton characterized the report as “another leak” in an interview with NPR and added that she “never sent or received any material marked classified, and that hasn’t changed in all of these months.”
The interview followed a Tuesday Fox News report concerning a letter from Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III, who said he had identified “several dozen” additional classified emails on Clinton’s server. The report said McCullough’s letter indicated those emails were classified at a level beyond “top secret.”
Clinton argued that the matter was an “interagency dispute” about how to classify certain materials. She told NPR she would leave the issue to the Justice Department.
“I’m just going to leave it up to the professionals at the Justice Department, because nothing that this says changes the fact that I never sent or received material marked classified,” Clinton told NPR.
The Clinton campaign on Tuesday accused the inspector general of selectively leaking “materials in order to resurface the same allegations and try to hurt Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign,” according to the Associated Press.
Clinton told NPR that the emails in question included an innocuous New York Times article on the then-classified drone program that had been forwarded to her.
“How a New York Times public article that goes around the world could be in any way viewed as classified or the fact that it would be sent to other people off of the New York Times site, I think, is one of the difficulties that people have in understanding what this is about,” she told NPR, repeating that she never sent or received classified information on her private server.
“I did perhaps receive some New York Times articles,” she continued.
