Clinton has come under fire for using a private email account and server at her home in NY for official emails during her tenure as secretary of state between 2009 and 2013.
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The FBI in July ended a yearlong inquiry into whether she broke the law by utilizing a server that was private.
The email scandal started this year when the FBI started investigating the use of private and locked accounts s in government’ communications in the interest of transparency.
The FBI notes said investigators identified 13 mobile devices that “potentially were used to send emails using Clinton’s Clintonemail.com email address”.
Investigators also found that the State Department issued a guidance to employees not to use their personal emails for work during Clinton’s tenure. “CLINTON could not say for sure if the parenthetical ‘C” is used for portion marking classified documents”.
However, investigative limitations, including the FBI’s inability to obtain all mobile devices and various computer components associated with Clinton’s person e-mail system, prevented the Federal Bureau of Investigation from conclusively determining whether the classified information transmitted and stored on Clinton’s personal server systems was compromised via cyber intrusion or other means.
More than 30 times the response of the presidential candidate when asked about key elements of the classified information she handled in her personal email accounts was “I do not recall”.
According to the files, Clinton claimed to have relied on the judgment of her aides and other officials to handle classified material appropriately.
“When asked about the email chain containing ‘(C)’ portion markings that State determined to now contain CONFIDENTIAL information, Clinton stated that she did not know what the ‘(C)’ meant at the beginning of the paragraphs and speculated it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order”.
She added that “everyone at State knew she had a private email address”, though in separate interviews several on her team told agents they had no idea she was using a private account. Clinton stated she did not recall this specific notice. She said she thought the practice went back “200 years”.
After taking her oath of office in 2009, Clinton asked former Secretary of State Colin Powell about communicating official matters on a BlackBerry.
Friday’s hailstorm of revelations could also give new legs to demands by congressional Republicans that Clinton be denied access to classified information and investigated for perjury.
“Be very careful”, Powell cautioned Clinton in an email.
Sometime between March 25 and 31 – weeks after the server was disclosed – the person realized that he did not make the email retention policy changes that had been requested months earlier. The name of the person who deleted the emails was redacted.
BleachBit is a software created to prevent the recovery of deleted files.
Mrs Clinton also said she did not pay attention to the differences between levels of classification, such as “top secret” and “secret”, indicating that she took “all classified information seriously”. Still, the agency said that the server had faced ongoing threats from possible hackers, including phishing email attacks and failed login attempts. But investigators said their forensic analysis was limited by the FBI’s inability to recover all server equipment and by the lack of complete server log data.
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Such passages could help explain why FBI Director James Comey said during congressional testimony in July that there were questions over whether Clinton was “sophisticated enough” to know at the time what a particular classified marking signified.
