A second intelligence review of two emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton received on her personal email account as secretary of state has found that they contained highly classified information, The New York Times reported.
The Times, citing unnamed senior intelligence officials, reported late Monday that the review concluded the emails were “Top Secret” when they were sent to Clinton in 2009 and 2011. One concerned North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, the newspaper said.
The review, by the CIA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, endorsed a finding by the inspector general for the intelligence agencies, The Times reported.
A Clinton campaign official told NBC News' Andrea Mitchell that because the inspector general had already gone public with the finding, "it is not a surprise that other lawyers in the intelligence community would agree with him."
The official went on: "That does not change the fact that other officials in the government disagree with this assessment, with some noting the prevalence of a phenomenon known as 'parallel reporting' in which officials from different government agencies become aware of the same information through different means — and it need not entail sensitive intelligence methods."
A spokesman for the State Department, John Kirby, explained that point to The Times.
“Very often both the State Department and the intelligence community acquire information on the same matter through separate channels," he said. "Thus, there can be two or more separate reports and not all of them based on classified means. At this time, any conclusion about the classification of the documents in question would be premature.”
Clinton has said that her emails contained no information that was marked classified. On Monday, she told The Associated Press: “What I did was allowed by the State Department. It was fully above board.”
