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Clinton addressing e-mail controversy with the media at the United Nations Headquarters

There are numerous controversies a Hillary Rodham Clinton used personal email accounts on a non-government, privately maintained email server—in lieu of official government email accounts, maintained on Federal government servers secured by the government—when conducting official business during her tenure as United States Secretary of State. Officials from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and some members of Congress have contended that her use of that private messaging system violated State Department protocols and procedures, and Federal laws and regulations governing recordkeeping requirements. Many of the emails in question are being made public on a gradual schedule, as the matter is being investigated by the United States House Select Committee on Benghazi, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

On July 9, 2015, Clinton responded to these accusations by stating that everything she did was permitted, and not in violation of any laws or regulations. On August 11, 2015, Clinton agreed to turn over her personal email server to the Department of Justice, as well as thumb drives containing copies of her e-mails, after the FBI opened an investigation at the request of the United States Intelligence Community's inspector general that they look into whether classified information could be compromised because it was sent over unsecured networks and may remain on Clinton's private server. The inspector general's referral was a "counterintelligence referral", not a "criminal referral", over concerns that classified information could be compromised, not that any crimes may have been committed, a spokeswoman for the Intelligence Community's IG stated.

Some of the commentary on the email case occurred in the context of Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. In a statement from Clinton's campaign responding to investigations into the email matter and the Justice Department's request that the private server be turned over to the FBI, Clinton's campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri wrote: "Look, this kind of nonsense comes with the territory of running for president. We know it, Hillary knows it, and we expect it to continue from now until Election Day."

The issue

On March 2, 2015, a New York Times article reported that throughout her time as U.S. Secretary of State, Clinton used her own private email server rather than a government-issued one. National Archives and Records Administration regulations in effect at the time required that any emails sent or received from personal accounts be preserved as part of the agency’s records, but Secretary Clinton and her top aides failed to do so. Clinton never had a state.gov email account.

On the day of the first Senate Confirmation hearing for Hillary Clinton's Secretary of State nomination, someone going by the name Eric Hoteham rented server space to host the domain names clintonemail.com, wjcoffice.com, and presidentclinton.com and listed Hillary Clinton's Chappaqua, New York home as the address for the domains. (Eric Hoteham may be a garbled version of Eric Hothem, a former Clinton aide.) The sites were then operated out of a private residence owned by the Clintons.

According to several security experts, including Chris Soghoian, this may have exposed her communications as Secretary of State to hacking and foreign surveillance, although there has been no determination that this happened. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) officials in 2009, had expressed concerns over possible violations of normal Federal recordkeeping procedures at the Department of State under Secretary Clinton, and that use of the private email server may have violated State Department protocols, as well as Federal laws and regulations governing recordkeeping requirements and removal and destruction of government property, It has also been argued that Clinton should never have had any official State Department information in a personal account, nor on a non-government server, particularly any highly sensitive or classified information, or any materials “respecting the national defense” such as drone signal intelligence.

This has been disputed by Jason R. Baron, the former head of litigation at NARA, who described Clinton's private email usage as "highly unusual" but not a violation of the law. A spokesman for former Secretary Clinton, Nick Merrill, also defended her use of the personal server and email accounts, contending that she had complied with the "letter and spirit of the rules," and Clinton herself stated that she had done so only as a matter of "convenience." Baron said: "It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario—short of nuclear winter—where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business."

UN press conference

On March 10, 2015, while attending a conference at the United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan, Clinton spoke with reporters for about 20 minutes. Clinton said that she had used a private email for convenience, because she did not want to carry two phones. She said that her staff would be turning over copies of 30,000 emails from her private server from her time at the State Department that she believed belonged in the public domain. She said that they had deleted another 32,000 emails from the server from that same time period, that she regarded as personal and private. Hillary Clinton used both an iPad and a Blackberry while Secretary of State.

House Select Committee on Benghazi

On March 27, 2015, Trey Gowdy, Republican chairman of the United States House Select Committee on Benghazi, asserted that some time after October 2014, Clinton "unilaterally decided to wipe her server clean" and "summarily decided to delete all emails."

That same day Clinton's attorney, David E. Kendall, stated that an examination showed that no copies of any of Clinton's emails remained on the server. Kendall explained that, after Clinton lawyers had decided which emails needed to be turned over, a setting on the server was changed so that it would only retain emails for 60 days.

Sidney Blumenthal memos

A portion of the emails on Clinton's private server were emails sent in 2011 and 2012 by Sidney Blumenthal, a political supporter and former campaign staffer who was then working for the Clinton Foundation. Fifteen emails from Blumenthal produced by another source are missing from the emails produced by Clinton. In 2009, "aides to President Obama" barred Blumenthal from a State Department job under Clinton.

In the 2011 and 2012 emails, Blumenthal prepared, from public and other sources, about twenty-five memos which he sent to Clinton, which she then shared through her aide, Jake Sullivan, with senior State Department personnel, including J. Christopher Stevens, United States Ambassador to Libya. In the form of intelligence briefings, the memos sometimes mentioned Blumenthal’s business associates and, at times, contained inaccurate information. Clinton herself was sometimes skeptical, saying on March 9, 2012 that one of Blumenthal's mails "strains credulity."

The Gowdy committee served a subpoena on Blumenthal on May 19, 2015, for a deposition regarding this matter to be held on June 3, 2015.

State Department releases of Clinton emails

Republican response

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said, in a statement regarding the June 30 email releases, "These emails ... are just the tip of the iceberg, and we will never get full disclosure until Hillary Clinton releases her secret server for an independent investigation." Gowdy said on June 29, 2015 that he would still press the State Department for a fuller accounting of Clinton’s emails, after the panel obtained 15 additional Blumenthal emails the department had not provided to the Committee, and said the Committee may request that current Secretary of State John F. Kerry testify. He said, however, that he would hold off summoning former-Secretary Clinton, until "the Department of State decides to give me the documents that I need to have a constructive conversation with her."

House Committee subpoenas for Department testimony

On June 22, 2015, the Select Committee on Benghazi released emails it uncovered to and from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that should have been included, but were not, in those turned over in response to prior requests by the Committee. The emails came to light as part of a document request to Sidney Blumenthal, who was recently deposed by the Committee, after it was discovered nearly half of Secretary Clinton's extant public record regarding Libya and Benghazi pertains to emails from Blumenthal. “Once again the Benghazi Committee uncovers information that should already be part of the public record but was not made available to the American people or congressional investigators,” said Gowdy in a press release when the emails were made public. “These emails should have been part of the public record when Secretary Clinton left office and at a bare minimum included when the State Department released Clinton’s self-selected records on Libya. For that reason, the committee has made the decision to release the latest set of Clinton’s public records unearthed by the committee.”

Clinton had maintained that all work-related emails were included in the 55,000 pages of documents she provided to the State Department, and that only emails of a personal nature on her private server were destroyed. The State Department informed the Select Benghazi Committee on June 25, 2015, that they are no longer certain that is the case. Assistant Secretary of State Julia Frifield confirmed that 10 emails and parts of five others from Sidney Blumenthal, which the Committee had made public on June 22, could not be located in the Department's records, but that the 46 other, previously unreleased Libya-related Blumenthal emails published by the Committee, were in the Department's records. Committee Members said this raises new questions about Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email server, and whether she has in fact turned over all her work-related correspondence, as she has previously claimed. The sworn testimony of Clinton filed in federal court August 10, 2015 was, “I have directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or potentially were federal records be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done.”

In response, Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill, when asked about the discrepancy said: "She has turned over 55,000 pages of materials to the State Department, including all emails in her possession from Mr. Blumenthal." And Clinton has consistently maintained that her use of the non-government server while at the State Department—that was not known about but by a small circle of top aides, outside advisers, and family members—was only as a matter of personal convenience.

On June 28, 2015, Chairman Gowdy said the Committee may bring Secretary of State John Kerry before the panel to explain what he called a major failure to provide internal State Department documents that Congress has sought for months. "I have met with Secretary Kerry's chief of staff privately, we talked on the phone last week, our next interaction will be public," he said, "and ... if I don't get satisfaction with that public interaction with his chief of staff, the next person to come explain to Congress why he has been so recalcitrant in turning over documents will be the secretary himself".

Gowdy is seeking the emails of ten top Hillary Clinton aides during her time as secretary of State, and says the Department has provided just some messages from one of them. Gowdy has said that the extent of the Department's cooperation is important, because the Committee will not call Clinton herself to testify until lawmakers have all the documents, to inform their questions. Democrats contend that Republicans are delaying the anticipated hearing with Clinton, to delay her testimony and their investigation further into the 2016 presidential election season. Clinton has said that she is ready to testify.

State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach, in response to Gowdy's statements, said the Department will "continue to be as accommodating and as transparent as possible" with the committee, and defended the disclosures to date. "We've produced tens of thousands of pages of emails and documents to satisfy their requirements, including from Secretary Clinton and all of the individuals identified in the Committee's document requests."

Clinton campaign staff accused Gowdy and Republicans of "clinging to their invented scandal." John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton's 2016 campaign, issued a statement saying: "If Representative Gowdy is going to continue his taxpayer-funded campaign, he needs to explain himself. He needs to explain what wasn't satisfactory about seven previous congressional investigations, the independent and exhaustive findings of the Accountability Review Board, and the conclusions of his Republican counterparts on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and on the House Armed Services Committee, both of which found no wrongdoing."

Republican Committee members were encouraged about the validity of their probe, when it was revealed that Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal had provided emails to the panel that the State Department had said they could not find among the messages that Clinton turned over to the Department from her private server in 2014. Department spokesmen said that all or parts of 15 of those exchanges were missing, fueling further criticism of Clinton's claim that she had provided a complete record of all her work-related emails.

CNN Interview

In her first national interview of the 2016 Presidential race, with CNN's Brianna Keilar, on July 7, 2015, Clinton was asked about her use of private email accounts while serving as Secretary of State. She said:

Everything I did was permitted. There was no law. There was no regulation. There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate. Previous secretaries of state have said they did the same thing…. Everything I did was permitted by law and regulation. I had one device. When I mailed anybody in the government, it would go into the government system.

Journalist Glenn Kessler evaluated this statement in his Washington Post "Fact Checker" column and gave Clinton three out of four Pinocchios, writing: "Clinton's decision to use a private e-mail system for official business was highly unusual and flouted State Department procedures, even if not expressly prohibited by law at the time. Moreover, while she claims 'everything I did was permitted,' she appears to have not complied with the requirement to turn over her business-related e-mails before she left government service."

Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State

The conservative organization Judicial Watch filed a complaint against the Department of State in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on September 10, 2013. In the complaint, Judicial Watch sought records under the federal Freedom of Information Act relating to Clinton aide Huma Abedin (Clinton's deputy chief of staff for operations at the State Department from January 22, 2009, to June 2, 2012, and a senior advisor at the State Department from June 2, 2012 until February 15, 2013). Judicial Watch is particularly interested in Abedin's role as a "special government employee" (SGE), a consulting position which allowed Abedin to represent outside clients while also serving at the State Department. After corresponding with the State Department, Judicial Watch agreed to dismiss its lawsuit on March 14, 2014. On March 12, 2015, in response to the March 2015 revelations about Clinton's private account, Judicial Watch filed a motion to reopen the suit, alleging that the State Department had misrepresented its search and had not properly preserved and maintained records under the Federal Records Act.

On June 19, 2015, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan granted Judicial Watch's motion to reopen the case.

On July 21, 2015, Judge Sullivan ordered the State Department to (1) "identify any and all servers, accounts, hard drives, or other devices currently in the possession or control of the State Department or otherwise that may contain" information responsive to Judicial Watch's request; and (2) "request that [Clinton, Abedin, and former Deputy Secretary of State Cheryl Mills] confirm, under penalty of perjury, that they have produced all responsive information that was or is in their possession as a result of their employment at the State Department." Judge Sullivan ordered that "If all such information has not yet been produced, the Government shall request the above named individuals produce the information forthwith; and ... request that the above named individuals describe, under penalty of perjury, the extent to which Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills used Mrs. Clinton's email server to conduct official government business."

On August 10, 2015, Clinton filed her confirmation declaration, made under oath. In it, Clinton stated that "I have directed that all my e-mails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or potentially were federal records be provided to the Department of State," and that as a result of this directive, 55,000 pages of emails were produced to the Department on December 5, 2014. Clinton also said in her statement that Abedin did have an email account through clintonemail.com that "was used at times for government business," but that Mills did not.

The statement was filed as Clinton faced questions over whether she turned over all work-related emails, but in June 2015, the State Department said that all or part of fifteen emails sent or received by Clinton in exchanges with Blumenthal were not among the emails she gave to the department last year. She did not address the matter of those fifteen emails in the statement filed on August 10. On August 20, 2015 the court ordered the State Department to ask the FBI to give it any emails recovered from Clinton's server that she had not previously given it.

Jason Leopold v. U.S. Department of State and rolling release of 55,000 pages

In November 2014, Jason Leopold of Vice News made a separate Freedom of Information Act request for all State Department records from Clinton's office during her tenure, "including all emails, as well as all records pertaining to meetings Clinton or any of her top aides attended during that time." On January 25, 2015, Leopold filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking to compel production of documents in response to his request. After federal government lawyers said that this request was overly broad, Leopold narrowed his request to records relating to sixty topics and search terms, including Gaza, Guantanamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, targeted assassinations, emails between Clinton and aide Philippe Reines, and the the Freedom of Information Act.

In a March 2015 court filing, federal lawyers said that the request was still too broad and burdensome, and requested a stay, proposing that Leopold receive no records until the State Department finished processing for release the 30,000 emails (55,000 pages of emails) turned over by Clinton to the State Department in December 2014. Leopold's attorneys filed a response arguing that the requested stay should be denied because it was open-ended and committed the State Department to no deadline.

In May 18, 2015, the State Department proposed releasing the entire 55,000 pages of emails in bulk on January 15, 2016 (two weeks before the Iowa caucuses). In a court declaration, John F. Hackett—the acting director of the Office of Information Programs and Services at the State Department, which is responsible for FOIA requests—stated that the records requested were "voluminous" and would take a long period of time to process "due to the breadth of topics, the nature of the communications, and the interests of several agencies."

The following day, however, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras rejected this proposal and instead ordered rolling production and release of the emails (according to a schedule to be set by the State Department no later than May 26), as well as a new production schedule and updates from counsel every sixty days. Judge Contreras also ordered the State Department to set an specific date for releasing 296 emails related to the 2012 Benghazi attack. The State Department announced that it planned to comply with the order and would not appeal.

On May 22, 2015, the State Department released its first batch of emails, totaling 296 emails (about 850 pages) publicly, posting them online. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said that the released emails "do not change the essential facts or our understanding of the events before, during or after the attacks."

On May 26, 2015, the State Department filed its proposal schedule for releasing the remainder of the documents. The department sought to release a new batch every 60 days. Attorneys for Leopold argued that this was insufficiently frequent, and proposed releasing a batch every two weeks. On May 27, 2015, Judge Contreras set a monthly deadline for document production, beginning June 30, with specific targets for the percentage of total email pages to released at each monthly deadline. Judge Contreras also ordered: "If, in any given month, the (Department) fails to meet the above-referenced production goal, it shall explain in detail ... how it intends to catch up with the schedule by adding resources or otherwise."

On June 30, 2015, the State Department produced its second batch of 1,925 emails (3,095 pages) from Clinton's private email account, mostly from 2009, shortly after she was sworn in as Secretary of State. The newly released emails are from a pool of more than 50,000 hard-copy, printed pages of emails turned over by the candidate to the Department earlier from her private email server account, and go beyond the initial 850 pages of emails released in May 2015, that related to the 2012 Benghazi attack in response to a continuing Congressional inquiry. That set of emails showed the extent to which Clinton received advice from Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidant, who had been barred from serving in an official role in the State Department by the Obama administration. In response to questions about Blumenthal's Libya emails, Clinton told reporters that Blumenthal was "just one of many old friends.... He sent me unsolicited emails which I passed on in some instances." Emails released on June 30, 2015 show that Blumenthal communicated with Clinton while Secretary on a variety of issues besides Benghazi, and that she had in fact, on occasion, solicited his advice. Most of the 3,000 emails in the June 30 release, pertained to routine scheduling matters and the like. Instead of revealing details about official State Department matters and policymaking, for the most part there were more mundane messages exchanged between Clinton and her staff, such as: “Did you see the photo in the NYPost of Bill and me from yesterday?” she sent to aid Huma Abedin in August 2009. In another, Clinton and Abedin exchange emails about the Hamptons, the beach community where the Clinton often vacation, but the entire text, beyond the subject line, is redacted. The State Department, in fact, redacted heavily from the messages, including in one instance labeling as "classified" an entire draft news release. In addition to such mundane matters, a number of emails were messages from prominent individuals involved in foreign affairs who were seeking Clinton's help. Such correspondents included longtime Clinton aide and confidant Sidney Blumenthal, who had financial interests in matters in Libya at the time, as well as Cherie Blair, wife of former British prime minister Tony Blair, who sought to arrange a meeting for the Qatari royal family with then Secretary of State Clinton.

On July 31, 2015, the State Department produced its third batch of emails.

On August 17, 2015, the State Department filed a court document in the case saying that it had reviewed 6,100 emails (20 percent of the full email set), and of these had referred 305 emails to the various intelligence agencies for further screening for classified information.

Associated Press v. U.S. Department of State

On March 11, 2015, the Associated Press filed an action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking to compel the State Department to release emails and other documents from Clinton's time as secretary of state. The AP had previously made requests under the Freedom of Information Act that were unfulfilled, including one request made five years previously and others that had been pending since July 2013. The AP specifically sought "materials related to [Clinton's] public and private calendars, correspondence involving longtime aides likely to play key roles in her expected campaign for president, and Clinton-related emails about the Osama bin Laden raid and National Security Agency surveillance practices." The suit was filed the day after Clinton acknowledged use of the private email account.. The State Department said that a high volume of FOIA requests and a large backlog had caused the delay.

On July 20, 2015, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon reacted angrily to what he said was "the State Department for four years dragging their feet, not addressing these issues for four years ... I want to find out what's been going on over there. I should say, what's not been going on over there ... The State Department, for reasons known only to itself ... has been, to say the least, recalcitrant in responding." When attorneys for the federal government could not state an estimate of how many State Department documents were responsive to the AP's request about Huma Abedin's employment, the judge told the federal government to produce it for a hearing the next week. Leon also ordered the State Department official responsible for FOIA requests to appear at the hearing. In reference to an AP request for the release of a set of slightly over sixty emails, Leon said the "even the least ambitious bureaucrat" could process the request faster than the State Department was doing.

On August 7, 2015, Leon issued an order setting a stringent schedule for the State Department to provide the AP with the requested documents. The order requires the State Department (1) to produce within thirty days about 68 pages of documents related to Abedin; (2) to produce within ninety days almost 5,000 pages of calendars and schedules from Clinton's term; and (3) to produce within eight months 13,387 pages of materials relating to oversight of the British defense contractor BAE Systems during Clinton's term. (The BAE Systems request was made by the AP in 2013 to seek information about a lengthy investigation into BAE over its overseas contracts, which ended in a settment with the Justice Department and an agreement by BAE System to pay a $79 million fine and undergo auditing and oversight; at the time of Leon's order, the State Department had turned over seven pages to the AP on the company). According to the AP, the order issued by Leon does not include the 55,000 pages of Clinton emails that the State Department is released on a staggered schedule in the separate Judicial Watch case, nor does it "take into account documents contained in 20 boxes that were recently given to the State Department by Philippe Reines, a former Clinton senior adviser." It was unclear whether the State Department planned to appeal from the order.

Classified information in emails

Clinton's responses to questions about whether she "improperly passed national-security information—that is, classified information—over this private, non-secured connection" have evolved over time. Clinton initially said "I did not e-mail any classified material to anyone on my e-mail. There is no classified material" and subsequently said "I did not send nor did I receive material marked classified." On August 19, 2015, the Clinton campaign said that emails on the private server that she used while secretary of state contained information that is now classified. The campaign stated that this material was retroactively classified by U.S. intelligence agencies after Clinton had received the material. Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said: "She was at worst a passive recipient of unwitting information that subsequently became deemed as classified." Clinton campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri has "stressed that Clinton was permitted to use her own email account as a government employee and that the same process concerning classification reviews would still be taking place had she used the standard 'state.gov' email account used by most department employees."

A June 29, 2015 memorandum from the inspector general of the State Department, Steve A. Linick, said that a review of 55,000 pages of Clinton emails found "hundreds of potentially classified emails within the collection."

A July 17, 2015 follow-up memo was sent by both the State Department inspector general and the Intelligence Community inspector general, I. Charles McCullough III, to Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick F. Kennedy." This memo states that the inspector generals had confirmed that "several of the emails contained classified (Intelligence Community) information, though they were not marked as classified" and that "at least one of the emails has been released to the public" by the State Department as part of the disclosures of Clinton emails.

On July 24, 2015, Linick and McCullough said in a joint statement that they had discovered classified information on the private email account used by Clinton as secretary of state. Investigators with the offices of inspector general said that they searched a sample of 40 emails (randomly drawn from the broader set of 30,000) and found four that contained classified information originating with U.S. intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency. In contrast to the Clinton campaign position, the inspectors general said that the information they found was classified when it was sent and remains so now. The inspectors general statement did not say whether Clinton sent or received the emails, and according to the New York times, if Clinton was a recipient, "it is not clear that she would have known that they contained government secrets, since they were not marked classified." In the statement, the inspectors said: "This classified information never should have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system." In a separate statement in the form of a letter to Congress, McCullough said that he had made a request to the State Department for access to a set of 30,000 emails turned over by Clinton, but that the Department rejected his request. In the same separate statement, McCullough said that Clinton's lawyer, David E. Kendall, was "purported" to also have copies of the 30,000 emails on a thumb drive. McCullough also stated that "None of the emails we reviewed had classification or dissemination markings, but some included [Intelligence Community]-derived classified information and should have been handled as classified, appropriately marked, and transmitted via a secure network." McCullough said that FOIA officials at the State Department had told his office that "there are potentially hundreds of classified emails within the approximately 30,000 provided by former Secretary Clinton." The discovery of the four emails prompted a "security referral" (but not a "criminal referral") to the Justice Department (specifically, Federal Bureau of Investigation counterintelligence); the inspectors general said that this referral was intended to alert authorities that "classified information may exist on at least one private server and thumb drive that are not in the government's possession."

On August 10, 2015, the Intelligence Community inspector general said that two of the 40 emails in the sample—neither of which were marked as classified at the time they were sent—have since subsequently been given a classified markings" after consultations with the CIA and other agencies where the material originated." The two emails specifically received labels of "TK" (for "Talent Keyhole," indicating material obtained by spy satellites) and NOFORN. One of the emails was "a discussion of a U.S. drone strike, part of a covert program that is widely known and discussed." The second email "could have improperly referred to highly classified material, but it also could have reflected information collected independently"—what is referred to as "parallel reporting," a classified matter also received in open sources.

The Associated Press reported that "Some officials said they believed the designations were a stretch — a knee-jerk move in a bureaucracy rife with over-classification." Jeffrey Toobin, in an August 2015 New Yorker article, wrote that the Clinton email affair is an illustration of overclassification, a problem written about by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his book Secrecy: The American Experience. Toobin writes that "government bureaucracies use classification rules to protect turf, to avoid embarrassment, to embarrass rivals—in short, for a variety of motives that have little to do with national security" and that "It's not only the public who cannot know the extent or content of government secrecy. Realistically, government officials can’t know either—and this is Hillary Clinton's problem." Toobin writes that "according to media reports, one of Clinton’s potentially classified e-mail exchanges is nothing more than a discussion of a newspaper story about drones. That such a discussion could be classified underlines the absurdity of the current system."

"It's born classified," said J. William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. government's Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). Leonard was director of ISOO, part of the White House's National Archives and Records Administration, from 2002 until 2008, and worked for both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. "If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by U.S. rules that is classified at the moment it's in U.S. channels and U.S. possession," he said in a telephone interview, adding that for the State Department to say otherwise was "blowing smoke."

Former intelligence officials believe that it is highly likely that electronic correspondence stored on the unencrypted private server "were targeted and collected by the Russian equivalent of NSA," but specialists in the field have also expressed doubt that significant classified information was released. According to The New York Times, "most specialists believe the occasional appearance of classified information in the Clinton account was probably of marginal consequence." Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said that inadvertent "spillage" of classified information into an unclassified realm is a common occurrence.

Server turned over to the FBI

The FBI had contacted the Denver firm, Platte River Networks, a technology services company that began managing the Clinton server in 2013, and may have provided backup services. The server, purchased in 2008 for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, was physically installed at the Clinton's home in Chappaqua, New York. It was managed by Clinton staffers with limited IT expertise or security clearance until 2013. Clinton, herself, knows very little about digital technology.

On August 12, 2015, Clinton turned over her personal email server to the FBI in the Department of Justice, as well as thumb drives containing copies of her e-mails, after the FBI opened an investigation at the request of the Intelligence Community inspector general that the FBI look into whether classified information could be compromised because it was sent over unsecured networks and may remain on Clinton's private server. The inspector general's referral was a "counterintelligence referral" (not a "criminal referral") over concerns that classified information could be compromised, not that any crimes may have been committed, a spokeswoman for the Intelligence Community's IG told ABC News.

The server had been stored at a private data center in New Jersey since 2013 by the Denver firm, Platte River Networks, which had managed Clinton's server since 2013. In a letter made public on August 18, 2015, to Senator Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Clinton's lawyer David Kendall said the server had been transferred to the FBI on August 12 by Platte River Networks. He also told the Senate committee that emails, and all other data stored on the server, had earlier been erased prior to the device being turned over to the authorities, and said that both he and another lawyer had been given security clearances by the State Department to handle thumb drives containing about 3,000 emails that Clinton subsequently also turned over to authorities. Kendall said the thumb drives had been stored in a safe provided to him in July by the State Department.

External links

• Statement on NARA’s Records Management Activities Relating to the State Department by the National Archives and Records Administration
• Clinton explainer on emails

Category:2015 controversies Category:2015 in American politics Category:Computing-related controversies and disputes Category:Diplomatic correspondence Category:Hillary Clinton Category:Political controversies in the United States Category:Articles containing video clips