Pressure mounts for criminal probe into Clinton emails
Legal experts are mounting pressure on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation against the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for mishandling sensitive government information.
Clinton used a private email account to conduct State Department business during her time as secretary of state.
The private account potentially put thousands of pages of State Department emails at risk, but it also shielded Clinton’s correspondence from congressional and Freedom of Information Act requests.
The Justice Department has not decided yet if it will open an investigation, officials say.
Critics assert that Clinton’s conduct was far worse than the mishandling of classified information that saw David Petraeus, a former CIA director and celebrated military leader, sentenced to two years probation and a $100,000 fine.
“What Petraeus did was really small in comparison, because there was no exposure of any information to any foreign intelligence services,” Kevin Carroll, a former CIA officer and secrecy lawyer, told The Washington Times.
Petraeus, who oversaw US operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, pleaded guilty to improperly sharing secret military files with his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell.
“In contrast, it’s certain that foreign intelligence services had access to the stuff on Hillary Clinton’s email,” Carroll said.
Carroll stressed that transferring classified information through a personal server is a “very serious counterintelligence breach” and that the Justice Department should look at the damage that has been done to “every agency that’s had its intelligence compromised.”
Inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence agencies have also called for a criminal investigation following their assessment in a June 29 memo that Clinton’s private server contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.”
Clinton has turned over about 30,000 emails from her time as secretary of state to the State Department.
The department has made some of the emails public and is reviewing others for public release.
Clinton was secretary of state during President Barack Obama’s first term and his primary opponent before that in the 2008 presidential election. She is also the wife of former US president Bill Clinton.
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