As Hillary Clinton's email controversy looms,
Fox News reports State Department officials told Senate investigators they did not anticipate her messages would be considered so secret and therefore did not provide her lawyer with a secure-enough method to read highly-classified material from her personal email server.
After the government determined that some of Clinton's emails may contain classified information, a safe was installed in the office of attorney David Kendall.
However, according to Fox News, the safe was deemed last week as not suitable for top-secret, sensitive compartmented information (TS/SCI).
"While the safe was suitable for up to (top-secret) information, it was not approved for TS/SCI material," said Assistant Secretary of State Julia Frifield in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley on Sept. 22.
"There was no indication that the emails might contain TS or TS/SCI material," Frifield added in the letter obtained by The Associated Press.
According to Fox News, the State Department's letter underscores how even the nation's diplomatic apparatus didn't anticipate Clinton sending or receiving highly sensitive information from a private email server while serving as secretary of state.
"It shows how badly the wires were crossed," said Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists.
Clinton has apologized for her use of a private email server and told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell "there are answers to all of these questions and I will continue to provide those answers... eventually I'll get to testify in public and I'm sure it will be a long and grueling time there. But all the questions will be answered, and I take responsibility and it wasn't the best choice."
But Fox News adds that Clinton's use of a private and unauthorized email server also raises the question of whether or not she withheld any work-related emails from the roughly 30,000 messages she provided to the State Department.
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