Some of the nation's intelligence agencies raised alarms last spring as the State Department began releasing emails from Hillary Clinton's private server, saying that a number of the messages contained information that should be classified top secret.
The diplomats saw things differently and pushed back at the spies.
In the months since, a battle has played out between the State Department and the intelligence agencies — as well as Congress — over what information on Clinton's private server was classified and what was the routine business of U.S. diplomacy, according to government officials and letters obtained by media. At the center of that argument, the officials said, is a top-secret program of the CIA that is anything but secret. It is the agency's long effort to track and kill suspected terrorists overseas with armed drones, which has been the subject of international debates, numerous newspaper articles, television programs and entire books.