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State Department Finishes Hillary Clinton Email Review – Finds Almost 600 Security Violations

State Department investigators just concluded their probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as Secretary of State, and they ended up finding nearly 600 security incidents that violated agency policy.

Daily Caller reported that the investigation, which was carried out by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, ended up finding that 38 individuals were culpable for 91 security violations. On top of that, 497 more violations were found, though no person was found to be culpable in those incidents.

The investigation, which ended on September 6, was launched in an attempt to determine if the exchange of emails on Clinton’s server “represented failure to properly safeguard classified information” and whether any individuals at State were culpable for any of the failures. During her time as Secretary of State, Clinton exchanged over 60,000 emails on a private email account hosted on a server that she kept at her home in New York. Clinton often exchanged emails withaides Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, and an outside adviser, Sidney Blumenthal.

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The FBI previously investigated whether Clinton mishandled classified information by using the server. In July of 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey said that while he would not be recommending charges against Clinton over her use of the server, he added that she was “extremely careless” in using an off-the-books email system.

In their investigation the FBI found that thousands of the emails on Clinton’s server contained some level of classified information. In fact, some of the emails contained information that was classified as top secret, the highest level of classification.

During their investigation, State Department officials reviewed all of Clinton’s emails, obtained hundreds of statements, and conducted dozens of in-person interviews with current and former State Department officials. They concluded that personal email use to conduct official State Department business “represented an increased risk of unauthorized disclosure.” In addition, they found that Clinton’s use of a personal email server “added an increased degree of risk of compromise as a private system lacks the network monitoring and intrusion detection capabilities of State Department networks.”

Upon concluding their investigation, officials found “no persuasive evidence” of “systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”

Investigators were not able to assign culpability in the 497 incidents partly because of the duration of the investigation. By the time the investigation began, many of the subjects of the probe, including Clinton and her aides, had left the State Department.

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