WASHINGTON -- The State Department on Monday released the 14th and final batch of emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private server.
The batch of 3,800 documents brought the total to more than 52,000, including 2,100 that were censored or withheld completely for containing information now deemed classified.
In releasing the final batch, the department also settled a dispute over one sensitive email as intelligence agencies dropped a monthslong demand that an exchange on North Korea's nuclear program to be designated "top secret," the highest level of classification. The State Department, which had insisted the information was not classified at all, won some ground as the intelligence community revised its initial assessment and determined the information was "secret," the next lower classification.
"Based on subsequent review, the intelligence community revisited its earlier assessment," State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters.
The department faced a Monday deadline set by a federal judge to release the final documents from the private server Clinton exclusively used while in government. Clinton aides went through her emails and turned over the ones they determined to be work-related.
The North Korea email is one of two that Charles McCullough, lead auditor for U.S. intelligence agencies, identified last year as particularly problematic. The other concerned the CIA's drone program and led to officials in January classifying 22 emails from Clinton's private account as "top secret." They were withheld from publication.
No emails Clinton wrote or received were marked as classified at the time of transmission, which Clinton has repeatedly cited in her own defense.
As with earlier releases, Monday's contained emails with information that has been upgraded to "secret" and "confidential." The department identified 261 as such, bringing the total of those upgrades to 2,093 for the entire set. No material in Monday's release contained documents with information now deemed "top secret."
A Section on 03/01/2016