Federal officials have asked the U.S. Justice Department to open a full criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton's exclusive use of a personal email account and home-based server during her tenure as secretary of state. The State Department and intelligence agencies said they have reason to believe that Clinton may have mishandled classified information after finding that her private account potentially contained hundreds of classified emails, The New York Times first reported.
Clinton has repeatedly insisted that she did not handle any classified information with her private email system. However, a June 29 memo authored by Patrick Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management, said that her private account contained "hundreds of potentially classified emails."
A follow-up memo from both the State Department and intelligence community inspectors general to Kennedy, sent on July 17, said they had received confirmation that "several of the emails contained classified (Intelligence Community) information, though they were not marked as classified. At least one of the emails has been released to the public," reports CNN.
Clinton's presidential campaign issued a statement saying, "Any released emails deemed classified by the administration have been done so after the fact, and not at the time they were transmitted."
It is unclear weather the inspectors general have found evidence indicating that she violated any laws, and the Justice Department has not yet decided if it will open an investigation, according to the Times.
Still, the issue has proven to be a consistent problem for Clinton's presidential campaign, and seems to have contributed to low voter trust for the Democratic front-runner. A poll released by Quinnipiac University this week found that voters in three key swing states don't trust Clinton. In Colorado, 62 percent of voters do not trust her, with 55 percent in Iowa and Virginia feeling the same.
A House committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya has focused its investigation into Clinton's personal email account, repeatedly accusing her of concealing information that could reveal new details into how the State Department handled the attacks.
Upon leaving the State Department, Clinton was required to turn over all business-related emails for public record-keeping purposes. After unilaterally deciding which emails were considered business-related and which should be considered private correspondence and thus deleted, Clinton finally turned over 55,000 pages of emails to the department in December and wiped her server clean. It was later discovered that she failed to turn over all work-related emails, which only heightened suspicions that she was hiding something, as HNGN reported.
The department is now under a court order to quickly review and release the 55,000 pages of emails. It released about 3,000 of those emails a few weeks ago, and another batch is scheduled for released by the end of this month.
