Hillary Clinton Cleared Of Mishandling Classified Information In Email Probe By State Department

The State Department announced on Friday it found no evidence that Hillary Clinton deliberately mishandled classified information while using a private email server during her tenure at the department from 2009 to 2013.

The State Department’s nine-page report on its probe of Clinton’s emails was finished last month and sent to lawmakers this week. The office of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) — the former Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman who also severely criticized Clinton’s use of a private emails — shared the State department’s conclusions on its inquiry on the Iowa Republican’s website on Friday.

“While there were some instances of classified information being inappropriately introduced into an unclassified system in furtherance of expedience,” the report said, “by and large, the individuals interviewed were aware of security policies and did their best to implement them in their operations.”

“There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information,” the report concluded.

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The investigation, which began more than three years ago, became a focal point of the Democratic former Secretary of State’s 2016 presidential campaign. The White House had recently contacted at least 130 current and former State Department officials for documents and information related to the probe. The Trump administration ultimately found that 38 of these unnamed diplomats were guilty of violating security procedures in an evaluation of approximately 33,000 missing emails sent to or from Clinton’s private server while she worked under President Barack Obama. The State Department concluded that these emails concerned topics that were not viewed as classified at the time, but were retroactively labeled as such.

President Donald Trump repeatedly criticized Clinton for her lost emails during the 2016 election, and even famously urged Russia to find the missing communications. Clinton was quick to blame former FBI Director James Comey for her 2016 election loss, as Comey reopened the investigation into her emails just two weeks before Trump’s victory.

In a recent interview with NowThis News, Clinton slammed the Trump administration’s decision to reopen the probe into her emails as a “witch hunt” and a diversion effort.