WASHINGTON — The number of classified e-mails recovered from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s home-brew server has risen to about 150, the State Department disclosed on Monday, before releasing some 7,000 communications overnight — including a cryptic message about gefilte fish.
“We have upgraded a number of these [to classified],” said agency spokesman Mark Toner. “We look at these e-mails and we upgrade them as necessary . . . We stand by our position that the information we upgraded was not marked classified at the time it was sent.”
Previously, 63 Clinton e-mails had been relabeled as classified.
The department’s latest e-mail dump offers an intriguing glimpse into the Democratic presidential front-runner, although the messages are hardly a threat to nationa security.
In December 2010, she joked with chief of staff Cheryl Mills and lawyer David Kendall about a news story on a man who robbed a bank while wearing a Hillary Clinton mask.
“Should I be flattered?” she asked. “Even a little bit?”
In January 2010, Clinton showed her lack of familiarity with computer security when she wrote to Mills and US development official Rajiv Shah.
“Cheryl and Raj — I sent you emails . . . pls do not forward to anyone and delete after reading Thx,” she wrote, apparently believing that mere deletion would keep the information secure.
Clinton gave warm praise to a current rival for the White House, ex-Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, in an April 2010 e-mail to former Sen. Barbara Mikulski.
“How’s our friend Martin doing,” she wrote. “He should be reelected by acclimation for steering the ship of state so well,” she wrote.
In a note to her staff, Clinton asked an aide to look up the times when popular TV shows “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Wife” aired.
And a bizarre March 5, 2010, e-mail to Jake Sullivan and another aide has in its subject line: “Gefilte fish.”
In it, Clinton asks, mysteriously, “Where are we on this?”
With Post Wires