Hillary Clinton: 'surprised' State Dept staffer used personal email

To comply with a court-ordered goal, the State Department made public a new batch of emails from Hillary Clinton's private server Friday morning, including 66 messages that were later marked classified on some level, CBS News reported.

The department released a total of 1,262 messages -- numbering nearly 3,000 pages of emails -- in the early morning hours, a week after it failed to meet a court-ordered target to publish 82 percent of emails by the end of 2015.

Sixty-five of those emails were upgraded to "confidential," the lowest level of classification, though they were not deemed so at the time they were sent. One document was subsequently marked "secret."

On Thursday, State Department spokesperson John Kirby noted that the latest release would "meet the 82 percent mark." In a briefing with reporters, he attributed December's delay to a "variety of reasons," including the holidays.

The Republican National Committee was quick to slam Clinton for the slow email releases, saying the Democratic front-runner's documents were "getting buried by her friends in the Obama Administration."

All 55,000 pages of emails stored on Clinton's homebrew server from her State Department tenure must be released by Jan. 29, according to the order by US District Judge Rudolph Contreras.

On the campaign trail, the presidential candidate has insisted that no classified information was sent or received through her private email server.

But in one email exchange between Clinton and staffer Jake Sullivan from June 17, 2011, the then-secretary advised her aide on sending a set of talking points via email when they had trouble sending them through secure means.

In another email conversation, Clinton expressed surprise that a State Department staffer would use a personal email account.

Source: MENA