Investigation Sought Into Hillary Clinton’s Emails By Byron Tau And Felicia Schwartz
http://www.wsj.com/articles/investigation-sought-into-hillary-clintons-emails-1437714369
Internal government review reveals that hundreds of messages contain potentially classified information.
WASHINGTON—An internal government review of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email archive has revealed that hundreds of those messages contain potentially classified information.
Due to concerns about the mishandling of classified information on Mrs. Clinton’s personal email server, the inspectors general for the Department of State and intelligence community have asked the Justice Department to consider a criminal investigation, according to a source familiar with the matter.
A memorandum from both inspectors general viewed by The Wall Street Journal found that an investigation discovered “hundreds of potentially classified emails within the collection” of Mrs. Clinton’s emails.
The inspectors general also found that at least one of Mrs. Clinton’s emails already publicly released on the State Department’s website allegedly contained classified information.
News of the request for a potential criminal investigation was first reported by The New York Times.
When she was Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton used her own email account that was run through a personal server for all her work-related correspondence. Though the arrangement was legal at the time for routine and unclassified correspondence, it has prompted questions from lawmakers and watchdogs about her compliance with federal records laws.
Mrs. Clinton has said that she preferred to use a personal server for convenience. In a March news conference, she insisted that no classified information had been sent or received from her personal email account.
“I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material,” she told reporters. “I’m certainly aware of the classified requirements and did not send classified material.”
It isn’t clear from the inspectors-general report whether the instances of classified material uncovered were considered classified at the time Mrs. Clinton sent the messages. In several instances, the State Department decided to classify an email rather than release it to the public, but the material was unclassified when she initially sent it.
“It’s not uncommon that something that you’re sending now on an unclassified network could in later years or later months be deemed to be classified either because the passage of time made it so or because events on the ground have borne out,” a State Department spokesman said earlier this month.
Critics say that her use of the personal email address skirted government regulations and helped shield Mrs. Clinton from open records requests and federal archiving rules. Others have questioned whether a private email server was secure against espionage and hacking.
Mrs. Clinton has said she turned over all relevant federal records before deleting all of her emails from her private server. The State Department is reviewing more than 55,000 pages of emails from her personal server for eventual public release.
Already several thousand pages have been made available and more releases will occur on a monthly basis, as ordered by a federal judge as part of a continuing dispute over access to Mrs. Clinton’s emails.
A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign didn’t return a request for comment. The Justice Department didn’t return a request for comment.
The email issue has become a distraction for her presidential campaign, which she launched earlier this year. At least one Republican-led congressional committee is probing her email arrangement, as well as the 2012 attacks on an American diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, while Mrs. Clinton was Secretary of State.
The committee’s investigation is expected to continue into the fall. Just this week, the panel announced that it was ordering a top State Department official to testify about ongoing delays in turning over information.
In addition, the State Department is facing several lawsuits from advocacy groups and news organizations over access to records from Mrs. Clinton’s time in office.
Mrs. Clinton told CNN in an interview earlier this month: “The truth is everything I did was permitted and I went above and beyond what anybody could have expected.”
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