“She relied on State officials to use their judgment when emailing her and could not recall anyone raising concerns with her regarding the sensitivity of the information she received at her email address”, according to the report.
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There was indication that unknown parties tried to gain access to her email server and one case where an email account belonging to a Bill Clinton staffer may have been successfully “compromised”.
The transcript also says Mrs Clinton’s “immediate staff” used their personal email accounts to conduct official State business, too. “Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data”, he wrote after she asked him about email use just a day after she became secretary of State.
The report shed light on how Mrs Clinton viewed her understanding of the handling of classified information.
The documents contained numerous instances in which Clinton did not recall specific emails or incidents, including on classified information procedures. She said she didn’t “pay attention” to categorization degrees, instead treating all classified material “seriously”. Obama had one “and it seemed convenient”, Clinton said, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“The truth is she was using it (her personal email) for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did”, he told the paper. In contrast, Trump’s campaign headquarters chose to stick to their central claim that Hillary Clinton can not be trusted as president as a result of her “reckless conduct and dishonest attempts to avoid accountability”. At least one federal judge is examining whether this was the case as part of a lawsuit against the State Department concerning public access to Clinton’s government records.
“I’m not going to speak to past email practices”, he said.
“Classified information should be handled with utmost care because the lives of those tasked with keeping America safe are at risk”, he said. And if so, did Clinton know that was happening or intentionally send classified information? Under the FBI’s long-standing policy, agents do not make audio or video recordings of their interviews.
In March 2015, Clinton acknowledged that she had exchanged about 60,000 emails from her private email account during her stint in the Obama administration, among which about half were personal and thus deleted.
The FBI did uncover several thousand work-related emails that Clinton failed to turn over. The person said he used a program known as BleachBit, open source software that lets users shred files, clear Internet history and wipe free space on a hard drive.
In their final assessment of Clinton’s email use, Bureau director James Comey stated that while the FBI “did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues meant to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information”.
Clinton used a total of 20 mobile devices – 13 Blackberries, two other phones and five Apple iPads – during her four years as secretary of state, none of which were provided by the government.
In July, FBI director James Comey recommended against charging Clinton with a crime for her staff’s handling of classified material.
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Mrs Clinton has claimed that her use of private email was allowed.
