Story highlights Hillary Clinton has denied sending classified information from personal server

Inspectors general find sample of emails contained classified information

Douglas Cox: Political stakes, voices on both sides make finding the truth challenging

Douglas Cox is an associate professor at the City University of New York School of Law. The views expressed are his own.

(CNN) Of the many allegations related to Hillary Clinton's emails -- ranging from reasonable to conspiratorial -- the most serious are the findings by two inspectors general that Clinton's private email server contained classified information and a related referral to the FBI concerning a "potential compromise of classified information." While details remain unclear, the alleged presence of classified information on a private email server undoubtedly has legal implications for the controversy -- and places a strain on Clinton's public defense.

When Clinton initially addressed the email controversy, her assurances that the emails contained no classified information were broad, unequivocal and perhaps overconfident. Indeed, for anyone who has witnessed the State Department's liberal use of redactions of classified information in publicly released documents, the assertion that thousands of emails sent and received by a secretary of state would not contain any classified information, even if only inadvertently, strained credulity.

Douglas Cox

Predictably, once the State Department began releasing portions of Clinton's emails, they contained redactions for classified information. Clinton's ready response was that these were "retroactive" classifications in which previously unclassified information was upgraded to classified when it was reviewed for public release. Therefore, Clinton's defense that at the time the emails had contained no classified information survived.

The inspectors general found , however, that a sample of Clinton's emails contains information that was classified "when they were generated," which therefore "should never have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system." This is a significant, serious allegation that cannot be lightly dismissed.

Clinton has doubled down and reasserted that she is "confident" no information in her emails was classified at the time, but her confidence in the precise content of 55,000 pages of emails sent years ago has to be waning. Further, if the concerns of the inspectors general materialize that potentially "hundreds" of emails contained information classified at the time and that it is "more likely than not" that the emails Clinton kept on a private server contain some "top secret" information, the most sensitive category, Clinton might be in the unenviable position of asserting that the intelligence community is simply wrong or that their conclusions are politically motivated.

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