The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has uncovered almost 15,000 previously undisclosed documents to or from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton when she served as secretary of state, a federal judge was told at a hearing on Monday. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is looking into the issue.
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Republicans are pressing to keep the issue of Clinton’s email use alive after the FBI closed its investigation last month without recommending criminal charges.
Democrats accuse Republicans of wasting millions on fruitless investigations of Clinton, following the GOP’s failure to uncover evidence supporting their claims Clinton was negligent in the deadly 2012 attack on a US diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya. “We are not sure what additional materials the Justice Department may have located, but if the State Department determines any of them to be work-related, then obviously we support those documents being released publicly, as well”.
It’s unclear whether the three companies will hand over the information or risk being held in contempt. Platte River Networks declined to comment on Monday, and both Datto and SECNAP didn’t immediately respond.
Clinton acknowledged at the time that it would have been “smarter” to use an official account and handed over for publication 55,000 pages of emails from her tenure at the State Department, but the case raised questions about whether classified government information was improperly handled on her personal account. Judicial Watch on Monday released 725 pages of new documents, including previously unreleased emails in which Mrs. Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin provided Clinton Foundation donors special, expedited access to the secretary of state.
Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said, “As we have always said, Hillary Clinton provided the State Department with all the work-related emails she had in her possession in 2014”. Lawyers for the department told U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg on Monday that they anticipate processing and releasing the first batch of these new emails in mid-October, raising the prospect that new messages sent or received by Clinton could become public just before November’s election.
That revelation came during an oversight hearing July 7 that lasted five hours in which Comey told Chaffetz that Clinton’s attorney’s, who did not have security clearances, had access to classified information.
The amount of the newly uncovered documents is nearly half of the roughly 30,000 work-related documents that Clinton’s lawyers turned over to the State Department in 2014.
“State has not yet had the opportunity to complete a review of the documents to determine whether they are agency records or if they are duplicative of documents State has already produced through the Freedom of Information Act, ” spokesman Mark Toner said.
Two thousand of those emails were upgraded to classified status, while the Federal Bureau of Investigation said 110 emails contained information that was classified at the time that Clinton sent or received it. In many instances, the preferential treatment provided to donors was at the specific request of Clinton Foundation executive Douglas Band.
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Several months ago, Clinton appeared before Congress for more than 11 hours to explain what occurred during that attack, and in early July the lawmakers’ final report on the incident was made public, a report that concluded that no evidence incriminating her had been found.
