WASHINGTON: Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the White House hit a major snag this weekend when the US State Department confirmed that she had used her personal server to send at least 22 top secret emails.

The information, the State Department said, was so secret that those emails would never be released to the public.

The controversy over the emails began in March 2015, when it became publicly known that she had used her family’s private server for her official email communications while in office.

Her Republican rivals in Congress argued that using of private messaging system for nearly 32,000 emails violated US laws, protocols and procedures.

Recently, a court ordered the State Department to release the emails. The department obliged.

Commenting on the emails released on Friday, Mrs Clinton’s main rival and Republican front-runner for the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump, said that she was “a major national security risk, not presidential material”.

A Democratic presidential hopeful, Bernie Sanders, said on Sunday that Mrs Clinton’s email controversy was “a very serious issue” but he would not want to politicise it.

Mrs Clinton, however, has rejected such claims as incorrect, saying that she only used the server to send or receive non-secret mails. She also said that her “overly aggressive” rivals were fuelling a vilification campaign against her.

But her claim “does not hold water” after the State Department’s confirmation that she indeed used her personal server for handling official and secret mails, said The Washington Post while commenting on the development.

The Clinton team, however, disagreed. “After a process that has been dominated by bureaucratic infighting that has too often played out in public view, the loudest and leakiest participants in this interagency dispute have now prevailed in blocking any release of these emails,” said campaign spokesman Brian Fallon.

The Post noted that Mrs Clinton had demanded the release of the emails, thinking that the State Department would never do so. She headed the department during President Barack Obama’s first tenure but stepped down to focus on her plans to run for the White House.

But the US media noted the timing of the State Department announcement, coming just days before the pivotal Iowa caucuses, and the nature of that announcement seemed likely to do much harm to her bid for the White House.

The information released by the State Department showed that the emails sent from her personal server did contain a variety of classified information including some information so sensitive that even now — years after she left her job as secretary of state — it can’t be released.

But the department also confirmed that Mrs Clinton’s never sent or received any information marked classified at the time.

The Republicans, however, point out that the revelation proved she was an irresponsible person as no secretary of state before her had used a private server to conduct official business.

They also rejected Mrs Clinton’s defence that it was the responsibility of individual government officials to send classified mails to her personal accounts. They argue that as the secretary of state, it was primarily her responsibility to do so.

Published in Dawn, February 1st, 2016