State Dept. Will Redact Portions of Hillary Clinton's Emails…Here's Why

The State Department acknowledged on Thursday that when it finally releases the emails that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handed over to the department, they could be significantly redacted, and many emails may not be released at all.

Spokesman Jen Psaki has said Clinton's emails will be released according to the standards used under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. That law is the mechanism the press and the public can use to formally ask the government to release information, although it often results in releases that are heavily redacted, usually in the form of black bars over the portions of documents that will not be made public.

The emails former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be redacted by the State Department when they are released, possibly for several reasons. Image: AP Photo/Richard Drew

Psaki said that using FOIA standards, State may redact parts of Clinton's emails for various reasons.

"This will follow FOIA standards, so FOIA redaction criteria includes national security, personal privacy, privilege and trade secrets, among others," she said. The "privilege" reason relates to executive privilege, she said.

Psaki said State would identify why portions of emails may be redacted, but didn't answer questions about whether State would acknowledge whether information was redacted because it was classified. That's a key question, since Clinton said this week that she never emailed any classified information, and State is in a position to confirm or deny that claim, depending on how well it explains why information was redacted.

But Psaki deflected that question by saying she wouldn't entertain hypothetical scenarios. "We're not going to pre-judge a process that is just underway in terms of what the content of the emails is," she said.

Psaki also said some of Clinton's emails may not be released at all, even though Clinton said she forwarded the State Department every work-related email she could find.

"There also may be emails in the 55,000 pages that are eventually deemed not to be agency records because, for example, they are strictly personal in nature and will be therefore… excluded from release entirely," she said.

New questions emerged on Thursday about exactly how Clinton decided which emails to give to the government, and which to destroy. On Tuesday, Clinton said her team looked over thousands of emails she sent from her personal email, and deleted all personal emails.

But Time Magazine reported that the more than 30,000 emails Clinton deleted were deemed as "personal" only because they didn't show up in a search for certain key words. Time quoted some experts saying that was an inadequate process, and indicated it could have resulted in the elimination of "personal" emails that actually contained some government-related information.

One of the major reasons for the search for Clinton's emails is a request from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which still says it appears to be missing several of Clinton's emails. That committee has also said the State Department itself can't verify that it has all of Clinton's work-related emails.