Inspector worried by Clinton emails
Federal investigators have alerted the Justice Department to a “potential compromise of classified information” arising from the private email server used by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in her home, a department official said Friday.
A memo signed this week by the inspector general of the intelligence community to members of Congress said the IG’s office had identified “potentially hundreds of classified emails” among the 30,000 that Clinton had provided and that are now being processed for public release. None of the emails were marked as classified at the time they were sent or received, but some should have been handled as such and sent on a secure computer network, according to the letter to congressional oversight committees from I. Charles McCullough III.
Clinton, campaigning in New York, commented briefly on the issue. She said, “We are all accountable to the American people to get the facts right, and I will do my part, but I’m also going to stay focused on the issues.”
The inspector general’s office said it raised concerns to FBI counter-intelligence officials that “these emails exist on at least one private server and thumb drive with classified information and those are not in the government’s possession,” said Andrea Wilson, a spokeswoman for the office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community.
A U.S. official said it was unclear whether classified information was mishandled and that the intelligence community letter to the Justice Department alerting it to the potential problem didn’t suggest any wrongdoing by Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate in the 2016 presidential race.
The memo from McCullough to Congress, dated Thursday, also said that his office had identified the accidental release of national security information during the process of reviewing Clinton’s emails and preparing them for release. The inspector general said he had recommended that the review of the emails be done on a top secret computer network and that the State Department should better co-ordinate with the Justice Department during the review process.
Clinton’s campaign said that she had “followed appropriate practices in dealing with classified materials.”
“Any released emails deemed classified by the administration have been done so after the fact, and not at the time they were transmitted,” campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said in a statement.