DES MOINES, Iowa — Hillary Clinton learned her lesson: No rope lines in Iowa. 
 
 In stark contrast to her 2008 campaign — which unraveled fast after Iowans rejected her for more a more approachable Barack Obama — Clinton put herself out at the Iowa State Fair Saturday, embracing the masses that engulfed her. 
 
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 The 2016 Democratic contender shook hands and took selfies with total strangers, listened to Iowans’ personal stories of struggle and even met a young boy’s show cow. She gave people hugs, patted babies on the head, munched on a grease-dripping pork chop and waved to cheering crowds on balconies as they called out her name. 
 
 It’s a world of difference from Clinton’s last White House bid, when she was criticized here for seeming too-cool-for-school to mingle with what she now calls ‘everyday Americans.’ Given Iowa’s traditional early-state role in presidential elections, its residents are accustomed to, and expect, face-to-face interaction with political candidates — never Clinton’s forte. 
 
 But during a two-day sweep through the Hawkeye State this weekend, Clinton is showing she’s learned her lesson — and that she’s really trying to put that problem behind her. 
 
 For starters, there were no rope lines keeping people out. During a July 4 parade in New Hampshire just a few weeks ago, Clinton separated herself off from reporters and others with a moving corral — which played terribly in the headlines and reinforced the image of a standoff contender who didn’t want to interact. 
 
 But at the fair, crowds totally swarmed her and her escort, former Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who just endorsed Clinton this week. The scrum following Clinton was so densely packed that followers at times had to take one-inch baby steps to move, bumping shoulders with people next to them — if they could move at all. 
 
 Few in the press could even get to her as she walked through a barn, and was promptly surrounded, to marveled at Iowa’s world-famous Butter Cow, a massive bovine statue made of pure cholesterol. 
 
 When people realized who was in the building, they pushed toward the cameras and flying boom microphones — so much that Clinton’s omnipresent security detail, which wore plaid shirts to blend in with the crowd, had to hold some back because they couldn’t keep eyes on everyone. With temperatures outside in the high 80s, the place was like a sauna. 
 
 People encircled balconies in the barn to get a glimpse of her, yelling “look here, Hillary!” or “Hillary, I love you!” And those on the ground who couldn’t see her because of all the bodies held up their phones, angling them such that they could snap a memento. 
 
 “I got a video,” one kid bragged to someone standing next to him. A Secret Service officer joked to POLITICO that he hadn’t even seen Clinton once since her arrival at the fair because of the thick crowd surrounding her. 
 
 Clinton supporter Dan Fredericks of Boone, who went up to praise Clinton in peron at the fair for her education policy, said he’s seen a real difference in her this year. 
 
 “She’s doing it. Right here,” he said, pointing down at the ground. “Last time she was kinda up, and Barack Obama was down with the crowds. Now, it’s giving me goosebumps … She’s having a good weekend.” 
 
 There was one notable stop Clinton didn’t make at the fair: the soapbox. Politicians, including GOP candidate Jeb Bush just a day earlier, will often jump up on the stage to take questions from Iowans. And on Saturday, just hours after Clinton left, her most threatening Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders got up there to rail against corporate American greed. 
 
 The crowd that surrounded Sanders during his soapbox speech was even larger than the one that followed Hillary, and the fact that Clinton wasn’t up there, too, prompted some criticism. 
 
 “Why didn’t she get on the soapbox to talk?” asked an irked Leslie Johnson of Waukee, who had just heard Sanders’s soapbox speech. She didn’t even know Clinton was at the fair. “Why didn’t she do that? … And I remember all this [when I vote]. I don’t forget.” 
 
 Sanders, however, did not take questions from the public as candidates on the box usually do — and his day at the fair was brief as he rushed passed Iowans in a hurried brisk walk, cameramen pushing and jabbing annoyed bystanders out of the way. 
 
 Clinton, by contrast, took her time, spending about an hour and a half at the fair as she inched along and people approached. A 30-something Iowan mother named April Stumpf asked her to support legalizing medicinal marijuana nationally. Stumpf’s three-year-old daughter, Quinn, has a severe case of epilepsy and is about to die, she explained to Clinton. Her doctors recommend medical marijuana to ease the pain, but it’s hard to get because it’s illegal to sell in Iowa. The state allows residents to get medical marijuana cards and purchase the drug out of state — but often states that sell it require patients to be present for purchase, and Quinn is too sick to travel. 
 
 “She’s not expected to live past … ” her voice trailed off. “I mean, she can go at any time.” 
 
 Clinton agreed that there should be more research on the subject. And when Stumpf walked away, she dispatched her aides to get her contact information as the crowd continued onward. 
 
 Before meeting the public, Clinton and Harkin gaggled with reporters behind a small, muddied pasture for livestock toward the edge of the fair. Before the press conference they chatted with a young boy behind the pasture fence who was holding a cow on a leash. 
 
 Then Harkin praised Clinton for her public service. 
 
 “I saw Clinton behind the cameras” on Capitol Hill, Harkin said. “She’s always fighting for those kids, those families … for early childhood education … to ensure pay equity for women.” 
 
 Multiple reporters pressed Clinton on the email scandal dogging her back in Washington D.C. She pushed back, reiterating that she used her private account for convenience and vowing that she “never sent any classified material or received any marked classified.” She belittled the issue. 
 
 “It isn’t anything people talk to me about,” she said. “They never raise it in my town halls.” 
 
 During her visit she ran into a number of people she seemed to know, suggesting a little pre-planning on the part of the campaign. She dished about horse racing with one woman related to a longtime Iowa-based Clinton supporter. Then, there was prominent Iowa real estate developer Bill Knapp, and the sister of a former colleague of Clinton’s at the University of Arkansas law school. 
 
 She seemed to have fun. Clinton and her top aide Huma Abedin joked about a straw hat Harkin wore. And Clinton raved on and on about being a grandmother to another fair-goer. 
 
 “Bill and I are crazy [about our granddaughter]. We are just crazy. I am way over the top.” 
 
 By the time she jumped back into the black SUV that whisked her away, Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs had counted 42 pictures that Clinton posed for with fans — many of those were selfies. 
 
 “I’m your biggest fan,” said one sweaty gentleman who jumped to the head of the crowd and draped his arm around her for a photo. 
 
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 WASHINGTON — F.B.I. agents investigating Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private email server are seeking to determine who at the State Department passed highly classified information from secure networks to Mrs. Clinton’s personal account, according to law enforcement and diplomatic officials and others briefed on the investigation. 
 
 To track how the information flowed, agents will try to gain access to the email accounts of many State Department officials who worked there while Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, the officials said. State Department employees apparently circulated the emails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011, and some were ultimately forwarded to Mrs. Clinton. 
 
 They were not marked as classified, the State Department has said, and it is unclear whether its employees knew the origin of the information. 
 
 The F.B.I. is also trying to determine whether foreign powers, especially China or Russia, gained access to Mrs. Clinton’s private server, although at this point, any security breaches are speculation. 
 
 Law enforcement officials have said that Mrs. Clinton, who is seeking the 2016 Democratic nomination for president, is not a target of the investigation, and she has said there is no evidence that her account was hacked. There has also been no evidence that she broke the law, and many specialists believe the occasional appearance of classified information in her account was probably of marginal consequence. 
 
 A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton said in a statement on Friday that she “took the handling of classified information very seriously.” 
 
 “She always received classified materials in secure settings, either by phone, videoconference, on paper or in person,” said the spokesman, Nick Merrill. “If, however, some material unknowingly ended up somewhere on the State Department’s unclassified email system, we want to continue to be as helpful as possible in getting to the bottom of that.” 
 
 He added: “Beyond that, we’ll let the State Department and other agencies speak to the specifics.” 
 
 This week, the inspector general of the nation’s intelligence agencies, I. Charles McCullough III, informed members of Congress that Mrs. Clinton had “top secret” information, the highest classification of government intelligence, in her account. 
 
 Some of that information, according to a memorandum the inspector general sent to the heads of the Senate and House intelligence and judiciary committees, may have come from a program called Talent Keyhole, which relies on satellite intercepts of conversations or imagery data. The program involves some of the most secure information in the intelligence agencies’ computer systems. 
 
 Specifically, the inspector general told members of Congress that two emails should have been classified as top secret, with one of them designated “TOP SECRET//SI//TK/NOFORN.” Officials familiar with the nomenclature said that “SI” stood for “special intelligence,” usually indicating an intercepted communication, and that “TK” was routinely used as an abbreviation for Talent Keyhole, showing that the communication or an image was obtained from a satellite. 
 
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 Attached to the memo — which was publicly released by Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee — were copies of two of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that Mr. McCullough said contained classified information. Those emails were not released publicly. 
 
 The State Department has questioned whether the determination by Mr. McCullough is correct. Nevertheless, the findings are consistent with the view of some federal officials that the State Department is not rigorous enough in handling classified national security information. 
 
 In an unusual move, the F.B.I.’s inquiry is being led out of its headquarters in Washington, blocks from the White House. Nearly all investigations are assigned to one of the bureau’s 56 field offices. But given this inquiry’s importance, senior F.B.I. officials have opted to keep it closely held in Washington in the agency’s counterintelligence section, which investigates how national security secrets are handled. 
 
 The investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails has its roots in her decision to use only a private email account for her official business when she was secretary of state, an unorthodox decision that gave her some control over what was made public. She faced criticism when her use of the account became known this year, and after deleting what she said were more than 31,000 personal emails, she turned over more than 30,000 work-related emails for the State Department to make public. 
 
 Mrs. Clinton has said that her emails contained no classified information — having classified information outside a secure government account is illegal — and that she is fully cooperating with the investigation. But in reviewing a sampling of the emails for potential security breaches, Mr. McCullough said he found four out of 40 that contained classified information, though perhaps stripped of any indication that it was of classified origin. 
 
 According to current and former State Department officials who worked with Mrs. Clinton, most classified information was routed to classified government servers in her office, where it was printed out for her review. Her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, often operated the same way. 
 
 Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement Thursday in response to what she said were “allegations about Mrs. Clinton’s emails” that “none of the emails alleged to contain classified information were written by Secretary Clinton” and that “none of the emails alleged to contain classified information include any markings that indicate classified content.” 
 
 In a letter made public on Wednesday, David Kendall, Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer, said he had handed over to the Justice Department a thumb drive containing the 30,000 emails that had been given to the State Department. He also said the company that had handled Mrs. Clinton’s personal account had given the Justice Department the server Mrs. Clinton used to operate it. The company, Platte River Networks, had been in possession of the server since 2013. 
 
 Computer experts said it was likely that F.B.I. technicians would be able to recover from the server at least some of Mrs. Clinton’s deleted personal emails. 
 
 In addition, specially trained cybersecurity investigators will seek to determine whether Russian, Chinese or other hackers breached the account or tried to transfer any of Mrs. Clinton’s emails, including those containing the classified information, several officials said. 
 
 Mrs. Clinton’s successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, told CBS News this week that “it is very likely” that Russian or Chinese hackers read his emails, although he did not specify whether he was talking about his classified or unclassified accounts. “I certainly write things with that awareness,” he said.
– Hillary Clinton paid the obligatory visit to the Iowa State Fair today, and Politico sounds impressed that she could be seen "embracing the masses that engulfed her." It's a contrast to campaign events in the past, including her team's now-infamous use of a moving rope line last month to protect the candidate. It's also a notable departure from her appearance in Iowa in 2008, when she didn't want to mingle with the commonfolk, writes Rachel Bade. Clinton also made headlines this weekend for joking about her email controversy, notes NBC News. "You may have seen that I recently launched a Snapchat account," she said at a dinner last night. "I love it. I love it. Those messages disappear all by themselves." Today, reporters grilled her anew about the controversy, including whether her joke suggested she was taking it too lightly. "We'll see how this all plays out, but it's not something the people raise with me as I travel around the country," said Clinton, again reiterating that she never sent or received email marked as classified. The "marked as classified" is an important distinction: It turns out that some emails were indeed considered top secret, though it's unclear whether that designation came about after the emails were sent or whether State Department officials were careless. To help figure it out, the FBI will try to gain access to the accounts of State Department officials who were there during Clinton's tenure, reports the New York Times.