Des Moines, IA – Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton reiterated Saturday that she did not send or receive emails marked classified from her homemade email server while secretary of state, an issue that continues to overshadow her campaign.
Clinton told reporters at the Iowa State Fair that she would let the inquiry into her email use continue, while she blamed her Republican challengers and House GOP members for turning the issue into a partisan affair.
“The facts are the same as they have been from the very beginning,” she said.
Clinton recently turned her server over to the FBI to investigate the security of her email setup, which The Associated Press in March traced to an Internet connection at her home in Chappaqua, New York. Clinton later said she set up her own system — rather than use a State Department account — for the convenience of using one BlackBerry device.
Thousands of pages of her emails publicly released in recent months show Clinton did, in fact, receive messages later marked classified, including some that contained material regarding the production and dissemination of U.S. intelligence information.
Clinton said in March she had exchanged about 60,000 emails during her four years in the Obama administration, about half of which were personal and were deleted. She turned over the others to the State Department, which is reviewing and releasing them on a monthly basis.
Last month, the inspector general of the nation’s intelligence community raised concerns that classified information had traversed the email system and sent a counterintelligence referral to the Justice Department. The referral did not allege any criminal wrongdoing, and her attorney has said authorities want assurances that the emails continue to be properly stored and that Clinton is “actively cooperating.”
It’s unclear how well her email system was secured, whether it had proper data backups and whether it was constantly monitored for intrusions by hackers.
As reported by Vos Iz Neias