After brushing aside Republican demands over the past many months, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has finally agreed to surrender to the Department of Justice the controversial private email server that she used during her four years as Secretary of State.
Clinton’s decision comes in the wake of a probe initiated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation after a report from the Inspector General’s office that some Government secrets might have been compromised.
Two of four classified mails discovered on the server maintained at Clinton’s New York home reportedly contained material regarded as more sensitive than previously known, some media accounts stated.
Clinton, her spokesman Nick Merrill said, has directed her team to provide the email server and a thumb drive containing copies of her emails to the Justice Department of Justice. “She pledged to cooperate with the Government’s security inquiry, and if there are more questions, we will continue to address them,” Merrill told CNN.
The emails controversy has been a major talking point for the various Republican presidential aspirants to target Clinton in recent days, with front-runner Donald Trump charging that she “committed a crime” with her private server, but professing that she might get a free pass since all the prosecutors are Democrats.
Bobby Jindal, the Indian-American presidential hopeful who has been trailing in polls, referred to Clinton’s sworn affidavit that she has handed over all of her Government business emails and commented: “Which means that she’s one email away from prison time.”
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on Tuesday that two of the emails Clinton gave to the State Department were designated as “Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information”. They were among four that the Inspector General’s office confirmed as containing classified material, out of the 30,000 emails Clinton handed over to the State Department for review.