Clinton E-mail Scandal: FBI Discovers 15,000 More E-mails

Washington: The FBI has discovered almost 15,000 unrevealed documents linked to the e-mail scandal surrounding Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, US media reports said on Monday.

The documents were found during the FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while she was Secretary of State between 2009 and 2013. Some 30,000 documents linked to the scandal were already turned over by Clinton’s attorneys to the Department of State in 2014. The State Department has promised to publish the documents and on Monday assured federal Judge James E. Boasberg, who is hearing the case, that the department is “giving priority” to reviewing the new e-mail messages. However, it is still not known if the e-mails will be published before the November 8 election, in which the former first lady is contesting against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

The documents were found during the FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while she was Secretary of State between 2009 and 2013.

The e-mail controversy erupted in early 2015, when US media revealed that during her four years heading the State Department, Clinton always used a personal - and not an official - account for her communications, including a private server. Clinton acknowledged at the time that it would have been “smarter” to use an official account and handed over for publication 55,000 pages of e-mails from her tenure at the State Department, but the case raised questions about whether classified government information was improperly handled on her personal account.

The scandal also brought accusations from Republican lawmakers about Clinton’s handling of the 2012 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in which then-Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other US government officials died. Several months ago, Clinton appeared before Congress for more than 11 hours to explain what occurred during that attack.

The State Department identified around 2,100 e-mails from Clinton’s server as confidential, although it said that many of them were not considered classified at the time they were sent, but had been designated as such during the review. The scandal also brought accusations from Republican lawmakers about Clinton’s handling of the 2012 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in which then-Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other US government officials died. Several months ago, Clinton appeared before Congress for more than 11 hours to explain what occurred during that attack, and in early July the lawmakers’ final report on the incident was made public, a report that concluded that no evidence incriminating her had been found.

Thus, later in July the FBI recommended to the Department of Justice that no charges be filed against the Democratic candidate after the e-mail investigation, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch followed that advice and closed the case.

IANS