Democrats panic over Clinton email scandal: Hillary campaign issues 4,000-word explanation of why she's innocent after it emerges her private server held secret CIA intelligence and satellite info

Hillary Clinton's email troubles began when her private address was exposed by a Romanian hacker. Now the resulting scandal threatens to torpedo her presidential ambitions.

2008 – Hillary Clinton acquires a personal email server for her use in running for president, and has it installed in her Chappaqua, New York home

January 13, 2009 – Internet records show that the domain 'clintonemail.com' was created

January 21, 2009 – Clinton is confirmed by the U.S. Senate as President Obama's secretary of state

February 1, 2013 – Clinton leaves the State Department

March 20, 2013 – Clinton's private email address, hdr22@clintonemail.com, is made public when a Romanian hacker named 'Guccifer' (whose real name is Marcel Lazăr Lehel) hacks into longtime Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal's AOL email account and leaks images of his inbox – including emails from Clinton

June 2013 – Hillary's team shifts control of the email domain to an outside IT contractor in Denver called Platte River Networks, and sends the original server hardware to a data center facility in New Jersey, where it is erased

August 11, 2014 – Following a congressional subpoena and more than a year of delays, the State Department hands over a small number of Clinton's private emails, 10 in all, to a House committee investigating the 2012 terror attack on a State Department compound in Benghazi, Libya – including some emails from the hdr22@clintonemail.com address

November 2014 – The Benghazi committee asks the State Department for a larger batch of Clinton's emails and receives about 300 that relate to the Libya saga, amounting to 850 printed pages

December 5, 2014 – Clinton's aides say that in response to a request from the State Department, they have handed over about 55,000 pages of her work-related emails, comprising 30,490 messages

February 13, 2015 – The State Department sends the Benghazi committee another 850 pages of Clinton's emails, including some from two different accounts on the private 'clintonemail.com' server

February 27, 2015 – State Department staffers tell Benghazi committee aides that Clinton had used her private address exclusively during her tenure at the agency, and that they don't have any of her emails other than those she provided voluntarily

March 4, 2015 – The Associated Press reports that it has traced Clinton's private email address back to a private server at her Chappaqua, New York home, and that the server was registered under a fake name

March 10, 2015 – In a contentious press conference following a speech at the United Nations, Clinton admits that she deleted more than 30,000 emails that she says were personal in nature, and says she turned over everything work-related to the State Department, while insisting that 'I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email; there is no classified material'

March 11, 2015 – The Associated Press sues the State Department to force the release of Clinton's emails and other documents that the agency has failed to turn over following a Freedom Of Information Act request

April 12, 2015 – Clinton launches her second presidential campaign with an online video and begins two months of low-key campaigning marked by a lack of interaction with reporters

May 22, 2015 – The first 300 of Clinton's emails are made public by the State Department, revealing a close relationship with Blumenthal in the weeks following the Benghazi terror attack; one of them has been retroactively classified by the FBI as 'secret' but Clinton insists it was 'handled appropriately'

May 27, 2015 – A federal judge orders the State Department to begin releasing all of Clinton's emails in installments every 30 days, setting monthly targets for the agency so the work is completed by January 29, 2016

July 23, 2015 – Charles McCullough, the inspector general for the U.S. intelligence community tells members of Congress in a letter that a random sampling of 40 Clinton emails turned up four that contained material classified as secret

July 24, 2015 – Andrea Williams, spokeswoman for the McCulloush, says that the emails 'were classified when they were sent and are classified now.'

July 25, 2015 – During a campaign appearance in Iowa, Clinton modifies her position and tells reporters in Iowa that 'I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classifiedat the time it was sent and received' 

July 31, 2015 – The second State Department release of Clinton's emails, more than 1,300 in all, includes 41 that were marked 'classified' before they were made public

August 4, 2015 – Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill says in a statement that the candidate 'did not send nor receive any emails that were marked classified at the time'

August 11, 2015 – McCullough revises his statement to Congress, saying that two of the four emails in question should have been classified 'top secret' – but were not marked that way – and contained information from signal intercepts and keyhole satellite data; he adds that the other two emails are still being evaluated

August 11, 2015 – The FBI takes possession of Clinton's server hardware and three thumb drives in her lawyer's possession, which are said to contain copies of everything she turned over to the State Department

Hillary's campaign issued a 4,000-word defense of her on Wednesday, including two separate claims that she never used her private email account to handle classified information. The complete sections are reproduced here, including bolded text in the original:

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'Clinton said she did not use her email to send or receive classified information, but the State Department and two Inspectors General said some of these emails do contain classified information. Was her statement inaccurate?

'Clinton only used her account for unclassified email. No information in Clinton's emails was marked classified at the time she sent or received them.

'When information is reviewed for public release, it is common for information previously unclassified to be upgraded to classified if the State Department or another agency believes its public release could cause potential harm to national security, law enforcement or diplomatic relations.

'After reviewing a sampling of the 55,000 pages of emails, the Inspectors General have proffered that a small number of emails, which did not contain any classified markings and/or dissemination controls, should have been classified at the time they were sent. The State Department has said it disagrees with this assessment.

'Clinton hopes the State Department and the agencies involved in the review process will sort out as quickly as possible which of the 55,000 pages of emails are appropriate to share with the public.

'How did Clinton receive and consume classified information?

'The Secretary's office was located in a secure area. Classified information was viewed in hard copy by Clinton while in the office. While on travel, the State Department had rigorous protocols for her and traveling staff to receive and transmit information of all types.

'A separate, closed email system was used by the State Department for the purpose of handling classified communications, which was designed to prevent such information from being transmitted anywhere other than within that system.'