Hillary Clinton told the Federal Bureau of Investigation she couldn’t remember being trained to handle classified information by the State Department and relied on staff to tell her what was classified, according to the latest release by the feds as she struggles to shake the email scandal.
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The revelation came Friday as the FBI published scores of pages summarizing interviews with Clinton and her top aides that were held during the recently closed criminal investigation into her use of a private email server in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y., home. “When asked what the parenthetical “C” meant before a paragraph within the captioned email, CLINTON stated she did not know and could only speculate it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order”. Further, Clinton “could not give an example of how classification of a document was determined”. That particular email had been marked as classified at the confidential level, the lowest level of classification.
The FBI’s notes also reveal that Hillary didn’t care about the difference between different classification levels, and may not even have understood them.
Clinton has repeatedly said her use of private email was allowed.
The notes also suggest that when confronted with the possibility of cavalierly handling classified information, Clinton was defensive and argued that the information didn’t actually matter.
The specialist – who works for the Platte River Networks, the group running Clinton’s private email server – said he only realized the mistake until after the New York Times ran the story on the use of the private server. CLINTON was not concerned the displayed email contained classified information. Not only were numerous sections redacted, but the files showed the Federal Bureau of Investigation could not obtain 13 Clinton mobile devices that may have been used to send emails from her personal email address, in addition to two iPads. “On more than 2,000 occasions classified material was exposed on her private server, including highly sensitive Top-Secret information and intelligence”, said Jason Miller, senior communications advisor to the Trump Campaign. Clinton and her staff, however, said they were unaware the archives had been deleted.
Clinton said she did not have conversations with anyone “with regard to using the server to avoid” Freedom of Information Act regulations.
However, the Clinton Campaign asserted that the report once again proves that there was no justification for a case against her. She said she didn’t “pay attention” to categorization degrees, instead treating all classified material “seriously”.
In his reply to Clinton via email, Powell told Clinton to “be very careful” because the work-related emails she sent on her BlackBerry could become public record.
Yet while FBI Director Comey also stated that the FBI “found no evidence that any of the additional work-related emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to hide them”, he also made clear that violations of the federal records laws were not the subject of the FBI’s investigation.
There was indication that unknown parties attempted to access her email server and one case where an email account belonging to a Bill Clinton staffer may have already been successfully “undermined”.
“These were not Hillary Clinton’s emails – they were government records, and this was potentially one of the largest security breaches at the State Department because they had all these years of security records that just went out the door”, Chaffetz said. But she told agents there were never so many suspicious emails to cause concerns.
“I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data”, Powell said, according to the summary.
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According to the summary of her interview, Clinton said she did not know exactly what Powell was saying in that email and that his message “did not factor into her decision to use a personal email account”.
