Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign spokesman confirmed Tuesday that Clinton will give the Justice Department the private email server she exclusively used while serving as secretary of state, along with a backup thumb drive.
Campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said Clinton "directed her team to give her email server that was used during her tenure as Secretary to the Department of Justice, as well as a thumb drive containing copies of her emails already provided to the State Department," reported The Hill.
Merrill added that Clinton "pledged to cooperate with the government's security inquiry, and if there are more questions, we will continue to address them."
The Democratic presidential front-runner had previously refused to comply with demands from Republican critics to allow a third party to examine the server. Clinton's lawyer, David Kendall, previously told the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attacks that "there is no basis to support the proposed third-party review of the server."
But after the FBI recently began a criminal probe into Clinton's possible sending and storing of classified documents, Clinton apparently decided to relinquish the server and help blunt the investigation, which is expanding to include her top aides, according to CNN.
Investigators are concerned that Clinton's home-brew server was not properly secured and that highly classified documents may have been stolen by hackers and foreign governments. The AP noted that there is no indication that Clinton used encryption to shield the emails, and it was revealed in March that she used on a consumer grade email host that had previously been hacked.
On Tuesday, her attorney gave the FBI three thumb drives containing 30,000 emails after the FBI determined he could not be in possession of some of the information due to its highly classified nature, according to AP.
The State Department previously told David Kendall he could hold the emails at his law office in Washington.
Just hours before the Clinton team announced she would hand over the server, the Intelligence Community Inspector General told Congress that four emails on the server have now been classified as "Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information," which is one of the government's highest classification ratings.
The inspector general previously revealed that two of those emails were classified at the time they were sent, and told Congress that there are potentially hundreds more among the 30,000 Clinton turned over to the State Department for record-keeping purposes.
The FBI should be able to recover the other 30,000 emails that she unilaterally deleted after deeming them personal in nature, which some Republican investigators believe could reveal even more wrongdoings. That is, unless Clinton hired computer security experts to perform the difficult task of completely wiping the server clean, as some have suggested.
Her attorney said in March that no personal emails "reside on the server or on back-up systems associated with the server."
Clinton has repeatedly insisted that she did not send or receive any classified emails, and the State Department also disputes that the two emails were classified at the time they were sent.
Judge Andrew Napolitano told Fox News last week that Clinton could be charged with a number of felonies for sending classified documents, as HNGN reported.
"What Mrs. Clinton did, by transferring and moving classified information through a non-classified venue, that's a felony for each piece of information she passed through," Napolitano said on Fox News' "Hannity."
Over the weekend, Clinton signed a sworn statement for a federal judge saying that she has given the State Department all work-related emails from her clintonemail.com account, something that she has said on multiple occasions.
Republican presidential candidate and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said that the sworn statement puts Clinton "one email away from prison time," Breitbart reported.
"Hillary Clinton is already under investigation by the FBI," Jindal said in Iowa. "Now she's signed a sworn affidavit to a federal judge, under penalty of perjury, that she has handed over all of her government business emails."
"Which means that she's one email away from prison time. She'd better pray the Chinese government doesn't do a document dump."
"Maybe her friend Martha Stewart can stop giving her interior decorating advice and give her jailhouse survival tips instead," Jindal joked. "Orange really will be the new black."
Stewart spent some five months in prison after bring convicted in 2004 on felony charges of conspiracy, obstructing justice and lying to investigators about a well-timed stock sale. She signaled on Saturday that she may throw her support behind Clinton.
In Clinton's sworn affidavit filed Monday, she acknowledged that her deputy chief of staff and closest confidant, Human Abedin, also had an account on her personal server which she used for government business, reported McClatchy. It was the first time Clinton had disclosed that any of her former aides used personal accounts on her server for official federal business.
Clinton said her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, did not use an account on the server, but Clinton and administration officials have declined to provide a full list of who else might have had an account, according to McClatchy.
The State Department inspector general's office said that it is reviewing the use of "personal communications hardware and software" by former top aides following requests from Congress.
"We will follow the facts wherever they lead, to include former aides and associates, as appropriate," Douglas Welty, a spokesman for the State Department's inspector general, said.
