A USA congressional committee has been given a summary of the FBI’s questioning of Hillary Clinton last month regarding her use of a private e-mail server when she was secretary of state. The materials received were so highly classified that Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, the committee’s chairman, could not even read them in their entirety. Most members of Congress were not in town because of a congressional recess. She promised to maintain a separation between her official work and the foundation, but recently released emails written by staffers during her State Department tenure make clear that the supposed partition was far from impregnable.
Advertisement
“Last I heard, my colleagues had their turn with the documents at 1:30 p.m.”, said a Senate Judiciary committee aide.
The documents were obtained from Clinton’s private server during her four years as secretary of state in the FBI’s investigation.
It’s been more than a month since FBI Director James Comey announced the department was not recommending criminal charges against Clinton.
Having failed to find evidence to support their claims that Clinton was negligent in preventing or stopping the deadly 2012 terrorist attack on the US diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, Republicans are now focused on whether Clinton shaded the truth about her haphazard handling of emails containing government secrets.
The FBI documents are being kept in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, known within the intelligence community as a SCIF.
Those without sufficient security clearances can read only redacted versions and are forbidden from note-taking.
Democrats say the GOP is baldly trying to harm the Democratic nominee politically; Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said Republicans wanted the files “for the purposes of further second-guessing the career professionals at the Federal Bureau of Investigation”, and he asked for the documents to be publicly released so Republicans can’t “mischaracterize them through selective, partisan leaks”.
Bill Clinton said in June that there will be some changes made to their charity, but they will “cross that bridge when we come to it”. He said if all the documents were unclassified, then it would be surprising – though not prohibited – for them to be stored in a SCIF.
Advertisement
“Since it includes both classified and unclassified material, it makes sense that the collection as a whole would be stored in a secure environment, such as a SCIF”, he said. “The alternative would be to break up the materials into separate classified and unclassified parts and preserve them in separate locations, which might be awkward or inconvenient”.
