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Clinton Email On Benghazi Marked 'Secret'

Hillary Clinton received information - that has now been marked classified - on her private email server about the deadly attack on the US compound in Benghazi.

An email relating to reports of arrests in Libya following the raid was forwarded to the former Secretary of State by her deputy chief of staff.

The information was upgraded to "secret" on Friday as it was released in redacted form along with hundreds of Mrs Clinton's other emails while she was America's top diplomat.

The Democratic presidential candidate has been defending her use of the unsecure private email account since the launch of her campaign last month.

In New Hampshire on Friday, she said: "I'm glad that the emails are starting to come out.

"This is something that I've asked to be done."

Mrs Clinton said the FBI's request for one of her emails to be classified "doesn't change the fact all of the information in the emails was handled appropriately".

State Department officials said 23 words of the November 2012 email on Benghazi had been censored to protect information that may damage foreign relations.

They said no other redactions were made for secrecy reasons to the 896 emails totalling 296 pages released on Friday.

The correspondence is the first batch of some 55,000 of her emails that the State Department is currently reviewing for release.

After it emerged she had been using a private email, Mrs Clinton conceded in March it would have been "smarter" to use a government address.

But she insisted she never sent sensitive information through the account.

Friday's release backs up her claim, says Sky News' US correspondent Dominic Waghorn.

He says: "The email redacted on Friday was not classified at the time. So on that Mrs Clinton is in the clear.

"These emails - and more to come - will continue to give her critics an excuse to recycle theories that she was negligent over Benghazi , and the Obama administration was engaged in a cover-up.

"There is so far no smoking gun giving any substance to those claims.

"The more the public hears about emails, the more they'll be bored of them, unless something is eventually found proving misconduct."

Four Americans died in the September 2012 attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi.