THE FBI HAS released heavily redacted notes on its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State, which White House rival Donald Trump seized on to attack her fitness for office.
The 58 pages – 14 of which were entirely blacked out – showed that the FBI found no evidence that her email system was compromised but that it could not be ruled out because not all the mobile devices she used were recovered.
“The FBI did find that hostile foreign actors successfully gained access to the personal email accounts of individuals with whom Clinton was in regular contact and, in doing so, obtained emails sent to or received by Clinton on her personal account,” the notes said.
Clinton’s use of a private server has been the subject of simmering controversy as she runs for president against Trump, the Republican candidate.
The documents’ release follows the FBI’s decision in July not to prosecute Clinton for sending unsecured emails with classified material through the server, even though it found her to have been “extremely careless.”
Trump reaction
Trump’s campaign pounced on the release, charging that the notes “reinforce her tremendously bad judgment and dishonesty.
“Clinton’s secret email server was an end run around government transparency laws that wound up jeopardizing our national security and sensitive diplomatic efforts,” Trump spokesman Jason Miller said in a statement.
The notes released Friday said investigators identified 13 mobile devices that “potentially were used to send emails using Clinton’s Clintonemail.com email address.”
It said eight of the devices were Blackberries that she used while secretary of state, and the other five were devices, including four other Blackberries, that she used after leaving office.
In its summary of the interview with Clinton, the agency said she had received no instructions or directions on preserving or producing State Department records while transitioning out of her post.
Concussion
However, Clinton noted that she had suffered a concussion in December 2012, less than two months before leaving office, and then had a blood clot around New Year’s.
“Based on her doctor’s advice, she could only work at State for a few hours a day and could not recall every briefing she received,” the summary said.
Of some 30,000 emails Clinton subsequently turned over to the FBI, the agency’s director James Comey has said 110 contained classified information. Clinton had said none was classified at the time they were sent.
Another 2,000 emails were later “up-classified” to confidential.
Meanwhile, the State Department has been ordered to review for possible release nearly 15,000 additional email and documents uncovered during the FBI investigation that had not been disclosed by her lawyers.
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