WASHINGTON • Mrs Hillary Clinton has directed her aides to give the Justice Department an e-mail server that housed the personal account that she used exclusively while she was secretary of state, with a flash drive that contained copies of the e-mails.
The Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have sought the server and the flash drive as they probe how classified information was handled in connection with the account.
On Tuesday, the inspector-general for the intelligence community told members of Congress that Mrs Clinton had "top-secret" information - the highest classification of government intelligence - in two e-mails among the 40 from the private account that the State Department has allowed him to review.
Mrs Clinton's use of her private e-mail for her work as the United States' top diplomat came to light in March and drew fire from political opponents who accused her of sidestepping transparency and record-keeping laws. The private account was linked to a server in her New York home.
For months, Republican lawmakers have demanded that Mrs Clinton relinquish the server for inspection by an independent party, which she said she was not willing to do.
The State Department has declined to give the inspector-general, Mr I. Charles McCullough III, access to the entire trove of roughly 30,000 e-mails that Mrs Clinton handed over to the department last year.
Mrs Clinton deemed those e-mails work-related, and said she deleted an additional 30,000 messages that were personal.
Mrs Clinton has been widely criticised for creating an e-mail system that she said was more convenient for her, but that also helped shield her correspondence from Congress and the media.
She said she had never had any classified information on the
account, though Mr McCullough's findings raise questions about that claim, according to the New York Times report.
"I am confident that I never sent or received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received," she said at an event in Iowa last month. "What I think you're seeing here is a very typical kind of discussion, to some extent disagreement among various parts of the government, over what should or should not be publicly released."
The House committee looking into the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, asked Mrs Clinton earlier this year to turn over her server to a third party so it could determine whether she had deleted e-mails that might have included government records.
In late March, Mrs Clinton's lawyer, Mr David Kendall, told the committee that there was no reason to do so because the e-mails had been deleted from the server.
Mrs Clinton decided to turn over the server to the Justice Department and the FBI after Mr McCullough said he had found classified information on the account and the authorities began probing the matter.
NEW YORK TIMES, REUTERS
