Hillary Clinton maintains that she never received or sent classified email on her personal account. | AP Photo Clinton: I didn't generate any 'top secret' emails

Hillary Clinton told NBC she did not generate any of the 22 newly upgraded “top secret” emails recently withheld by the State Department and is not concerned about the contents of the messages.

“No, I did not,” she told NBC News’ Monica Alba on Saturday when asked whether she personally wrote any of the emails. She waved them off as old news, according to excerpts of the conversation distributed by NBC News. “I’m really not concerned because it’s the same story that has been going on for months now, and I just don’t think most people are as concerned about that as they are about what we’re going to do to get economy going and how we’re going to protect the Affordable Care Act and everything I talk about in this campaign because that’s what Iowans, Americans talk to me about.”


The State Department on Friday announced it would withhold in full seven “top secret” email chains that passed through Clinton’s unsecured server, a total of 22 documents and 37 pages of messages. It was the first time State agreed with the intelligence community inspector general that the contents of the messages were indeed sensitive enough to merit that highest classification level. State had previously contended that the intelligence community had overclassified some of the messages.

When asked about the contents of the messages, Clinton said she didn’t know details: “I don’t know which ones they have plucked out to fail to disclose, and we have called for all of them to be released.”

She emphasized that none of the messages was marked classified at the time, though there are still questions about whether the information was classified elsewhere when the messages were originally forwarded.

“This doesn’t change anything about the fundamental facts: I never sent or received any email that was classified,” she said. “I take classified information very seriously. … I want people to understand that based on what happened when it was happening in real time, there was no classification, and that’s what you have to be guided by.”

Clinton also accused the GOP of making political hay of the issue, though the FBI is also probing the matter.

“They — the Republicans are going to continue to attack,” she said. “There is no there there. … I can’t stop them from running whatever campaign they want to run and making up whatever story they want to make up.”

She argued that Democratic voters will see the email controversy much like the Benghazi investigation, which her campaign has blasted as a money-sucking political witch hunt aimed at destroying her candidacy.

“I think they’ve processed it like Benghazi,” she said. “The Republicans send out people to attack me on Benghazi. People come to see me. Democrats, they don’t ask me. They’re satisfied. They know what happened.”

Clinton’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, issued only a terse, two-sentence statement about the email developments on Friday.

“As I said at the first Democratic debate, there is a legal process in place which should proceed and not be politicized. The voters of Iowa and this nation deserve a serious discussion of the issues facing them,” Sanders said.

