“This classified information should never have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system”, two inspectors general – one for the State Department, the other for the U.S. intelligence community – stated on Friday. Clinton’s camp has stressed that no emails on her server contained information that was classified at the time. Would any of Clinton’s emails have been declared classified earlier had Clinton used her State Department email instead of a server that was inaccessible to officials?
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Nick Merrill, a Clinton campaign spokesman, responded with a second statement on Saturday disputing this. Is there information that would fuel persistent allegations that she traded favors as secretary of state with big donors to the family charitable foundation run by Bill Clinton?
Current and former U.S. intelligence officials say they assume that all of the email that transited Clinton’s home server is in the possession of Russian or Chinese intelligence services, who would have easily bypassed whatever security measures she took.
Back in March, during a speech she gave denying all allegations of impropriety, Mrs. Clinton looked into the television cameras and told America: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email”. “She was not exactly at the forefront of transparency in trying to make this public, and in fact, if she had listened to the President of the United States, her boss, on day one of the administration and done this on a government server, we wouldn’t have these issues”.
He also said Kendall requested the hearing date, reportedly October. 22, would not change, adding “the Department of State has been woefully recalcitrant in producing relevant documents”.
Hillary Clinton is scheduled to testify before the House committee on Benghazi in October, but tensions are so high that Congress refuses to agree on a date.
The Justice Department, as of Friday, hasn’t decided if it will investigate.
“Secretary Clinton’s campaign may want to reach out to her lawyer, Mr. David Kendall”, Ware said.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump charged on Sunday that Hillary Clinton’s private email practices as secretary of state were “criminal“.
“People are exhausted of these incompetent politicians in Washington that can’t get anything done”, he said.
“It’s probably typical of Bill and Hillary … that they will eventually do the thing that everybody knew they would have to do in the end”, Arlinghaus told the Herald.
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Information for this article was contributed by Anne Gearan of The Washington Post; by Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times; by Chris Strohm of Bloomberg News; and by Catherine Lucey of The Associated Press.
