The FBI has started investigating former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s controversial use of private e-mail while in office and has contacted a firm that managed the set-up, along with her attorney, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
Clinton’s electronic correspondence has been under scrutiny since her admission in March that she had used a private account for e-mail correspondence while in the post from 2009 to 2013.
The US Department of Justice received a referral to probe the storage of the e-mails last month after an assessment that her private account contained “hundreds of potentially classified e-mails.”
The FBI inquiry is looking into the servers and other systems Clinton had set up to handle those e-mails, the Post reported.
The FBI is also looking into how the e-mails in question are currently stored.
“The government is seeking assurance about the storage of those materials. We are actively cooperating,” Clinton’s lawyer David Kendall told the Post.
Republican rivals contend that Clinton, frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in next year’s elections, used the private account to keep e-mails out of the public record.
She says she handled her e-mail this way for the convenience of carrying a single smartphone.
Clinton’s campaign declined to address the FBI’s investigation.
Campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said the release of thousands of Clinton’s work e-mails was under way and should be sped up.
“We want to ensure that appropriate procedures are followed as these e-mails are reviewed while not unduly delaying the release of her e-mails,” Merrill told the Post. “We want that to happen as quickly and as transparently as possible.”
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