Hillary Rodham Clinton could be facing a criminal investigation into whether she “mishandled sensitive government information” on her private home-brew e-mail server, as two inspectors general have requested that the Department of Justice launch just such a probe, according to a report late Thursday night.
The request stems from an analysis by the inspectors generals, who claimed that Clinton’s correspondence on the server included “hundreds of potentially classified e-mails,” according to The New York Times.
The inspectors general notified the State Department of their request in a memo sent to Patrick F. Kennedy, undersecretary of state for management, the report said.
Clinton, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, has insisted ever since the revelation was made in March that she had no classified information in her e-mail account.
It has not been determined, however, whether the State Department marked any of her e-mails as “classified.”
The Times said that the Justice Department has not made a decision about whether it would, in fact, open a criminal inquiry.
Rivals blasted Clinton after it was revealed that she used a personal e-mail account, hosted on a private server in her Chappaqua home, to send and receive correspondence while serving as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
In light of the revelation, GOP lawmakers demanded that she publicly release the e-mails — thousands of which she claimed she had already deleted because they were personal.
Clinton has since submitted 55,000 e-mails to State, claiming they represented a complete record of her correspondence at the agency. The department is reviewing those e-mails, and has already released 3,000 pages.
With that release, the department retroactively decided that portions of about a dozen e-mails did, in fact, contain classified information, the Times said.
The memo written by the inspectors general also blasted the State Department for its bungling of sensitive government information by not consulting the proper intelligence agencies to determine whether information should be classified, the Times said.
Back in March, Clinton tried to quash debate about her private e-mail use by declaring that there were no secrets.
“I did not e-mail any classified material to anyone on my e-mail,” she said. “There is no classified material . . . I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements, and did not send classified material.”