Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton has relented to months of demands that she relinquish the personal e-mail server she used while at the Department of State, directing the device be given to the US Justice Department.
The decision, announced on Tuesday, advances the investigation into the Democratic presidential hopeful’s use of a private e-mail account as the nation’s top diplomat, and whether classified information was improperly sent via and stored on the e-mail server she ran from her house in New York.
Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said she has “pledged to cooperate with the government’s security inquiry, and if there are more questions, we will continue to address them.”
It is not clear if the device would yield any information — Clinton’s attorney in March said that no e-mails from the main personal address she used while secretary of state still “reside on the server or on back-up systems associated with the server.”
Clinton had previously refused demands from Republican critics to turn over the server to a third party, with attorney David Kendall telling a US House of Representatives committee investigating the 2012 attacks that killed four US citizens in Benghazi, Libya, that “there is no basis to support the proposed third-party review of the server.”
The e-mail controversy has proved a distraction to Clinton’s presidential campaign. Polls show her with a commanding lead over her Democratic presidential rivals, but the controversy over her use of a personal e-mail server has eroded her favorability ratings by rekindling questions about whether she is trustworthy. Republican presidential contenders hope it weakens her as a potential candidate in the US presidential elections in November next year.
Republicans jumped on Tuesday’s decision to change course, as well as the additional disclosure that two e-mails that traversed Clinton’s personal system were subsequently given one of the government’s highest classification ratings.
“All this means is that Hillary Clinton, in the face of FBI scrutiny, has decided she has run out of options,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement.
“She knows she did something wrong and has run out of ways to cover it up,” he said.
Federal investigators have begun looking into the security of Clintons’ e-mail setup amid concerns from the inspector general for the US intelligence community that classified information might have passed through the system.
There is no evidence she used encryption to shield the e-mails or her personal server from foreign intelligence services or other potentially prying eyes.
Kendall has said previously that Clinton is “actively cooperating” with the FBI inquiry.
In March, Clinton said she exchanged about 60,000 e-mails in her four years in US President Barack Obama’s administration, about half of which were personal and were discarded. She turned over the other half to the State Department in December last year.
The department is reviewing those e-mails and has begun the process of releasing them to the public.
Word that Clinton had relented on giving up possession of the server came as Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said two e-mails that traversed Clinton’s personal system were deemed “Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information” — a rating that is among the government’s highest classifications.
Intelligence Inspector-General Charles McCullough III had reported the new details about the higher classification to the US Congress on Tuesday, Grassley said.
“Secretary Clinton’s previous statements that she possessed no classified information were patently untrue,” House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement.
“Her mishandling of classified information must be fully investigated,” he said.
Those two e-mails were among four that had previously been determined by the inspector-general to have been classified at the time they were sent. The State Department disputes that the e-mails were classified at that time.
McCullough had told the US Congress that potentially hundreds of classified e-mails are among the cache that Clinton provided to the State Department.
Clinton has defended her use of the server, saying she used it as a matter of convenience to limit the number of electronic devices she had to carry.
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