F.B.I. Report Stirs New Controversy into Clinton's Use of Private Email

When she was U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton did not know that the letter "C" on emails sent to her meant that the communication was classified as "confidential", according to an F.B.I. report released on Friday.

Clinton was interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for more than three hours earlier this year in the bureau's investigation into her use of a private email server set up in her home when she ran the State Department.

Though many of the emails she held on the unsecured server were deemed classified, the F.B.I. decided not to prosecute her for mishandling such data, which is a felony under U.S. law.

The F.B.I. report of its interview with Clinton released Friday revealed that Clinton said she did not "pay attention" to the "level of classification" and took all classification "seriously." She said that she did not think there was any classified information on her servers, which she said she set up for "convenience."  Clinton said she left it up to her correspondents in the State Department to have been careful enough not to send classified material to her private, unsecured server. In fact dozens of classified documents were sent to her.

Critics say Clinton kept her emails at home rather than on a secure server at the State Department to hide them from future requests from researchers and journalists. Clinton said she deleted 30,000 emails, claiming they were private and had been mixed in with official communications.

The State Department wound up releasing thousands of her emails that were deemed unclassified and the F.B.I. says it has found additional emails that she never admitted having.

The F.B.I. decided to release the off-the-record interview with Clinton at the urging of Clinton's presidential campaign, who feared that Republican Congressmen, who had already receive the F.B.I. report, would twist its meaning to unfairly attack her.

The email controversy has dogged Clinton throughout her campaign for president and has been a constant refrain of criticism from her Republican challenger, Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the Romanian hacker who first made it known that Clinton was using an insecure server was sentenced to 52 months in jail by a judge in the United States. Marcel Lehel Lazar, better known as Guccifer, hacked into the account of Sidney Blumenthal, a close Clinton aid.  While he illegally obtained emails from Clinton to Blumenthal there is no evidence that he hacked into Clinton's account.

Romania on Friday said they wanted him returned to the country where he committed the crime to serve his time there. 

Source : QNA