“Containment first, then a damage assessment is how this must be handled.” That’s what a U.S. official directly familiar with the notification of top lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committee  about the extent of classified information on Hillary Clinton’s private email server told the Washington Times.

The official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, said the notification of possibly hundreds of additional emails with classified secrets came from the State Department Freedom of Information Act office to the Office of Inspector General for the Director of National Intelligence:

The official said the intelligence community’s first response was to take steps to secure the handling of remaining 30,000 emails and make sure they were handled on top-secret servers to avoid any further breaches, and then to assess any damage to national security from the insecure handling and release of information already in some of the publicly disseminated emails.

[. . .]

The official said the intelligence community was already concerned, for instance, that some classified information was inadvertently disclosed by the State Department in recent weeks when one of Mrs. Clinton’s emails about Libya was publicly released.

According to the Washington Times article, the inspector general’s notification to lawmakers and the Justice Department also “opens possible legal exposure for Mrs. Clinton about improper handling of classified materials.” The article also notes that is something Hillary’s attorney knows much about.

Mr. Kendall represented former CIA Director, Gen. David H. Petraeus last year when he pleaded guilty to a mishandling classified information. Petraeus was sentenced to serve two years on probation and to pay a $100,000 fine.

I’m anxiously waiting for the intelligence community to finish the containment, then we might learn what damage they think has been done.

I never expected the issue to have such legs and balloon into something that could present possible legal exposure for Hillary. I thought by now, five months after the New York Times revealed that Hillary exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record, Hillary would be dismissing it all as old news.

Hillary’s email fiasco continues to look worse and worse.

The bad news just keeps dribbling out. Yesterday, McClatchy reported that the “classified emails” stored on Hillary’s private server contained information from five U.S. intelligence agencies and included material related to the 2012 Benghazi attacks:

The Benghazi email made public contained information from the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a spy agency that maps and tracks satellite imagery, according to the official, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The other four classified emails contained information from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA, the official said.

Now I keep wondering what will be the next hit on Hillary’s inevitability presidential campaign to be discovered from the “records” she chose to turn over from her private email server.