The State Department on Thursday announced it is reopening an internal investigation into how Hillary Clinton and her top aides handled classified information while she was secretary of state. State Department spokesman John Kirby said the probe is restarting after the Justice Department’s announcement Wednesday that it won’t bring any criminal charges.
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The State Department had suspended its investigation into Clinton’s private email server, which began in January after it identified 22 of the emails as “top secret”, to avoid interfering with the FBI and Justice Department reviews.
On Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey said Clinton had been “careless” when when handling her emails.
“I can not provide specific information about the Department’s review, including what information we are evaluating”.
Clinton was secretary of state until early 2013.
The department’s inspector general has already conducted an investigation that found serious lapses in Clinton’s use of a private server and email address during her tenure as secretary of state.
Clinton now has a “top secret/special access programme” clearance – the highest – which the State Department renewed in 2013, two years after she resigned as secretary of state, according to correspondence between the State Department and Congress.
Clinton’s use of an unsecured, private email server was anything but a conscious effort to skirt public reporting requirements, Lucas said.
Although Kirby declined to provide specific information about the State Department’s latest review, he said it would aim to be “as transparent as possible about our results, while complying with our various legal obligations”. There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation. Director Comey stated: “From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department [from Clinton’s home server], 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received”. Most of her top advisers left shortly thereafter.
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One possible outcome of such internal reviews is that employees, even if they no longer work there, could face a range of disciplinary actions, from having notes placed in their employment files to losing their security clearances. 12 FAM 512.1-1 (b) states that “senior agency officials have the primary responsibility of overseeing their respective agency’s information security program”.
