The debate has drawn scrutiny from a former Justice Department official concerned that details might leak out. | Getty FBI hands over Clinton email interview summary to Congress Reports of the planned release to Congress drew complaints from some former Justice Department officials that doing so would set a bad precedent.

The FBI on Tuesday handed over to Congress classified records from its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, the latest development in the scandal that the Democratic nominee just can’t shake.

Among the materials turned over to Capitol Hill was an FBI summary of the 3½-hour interview Clinton submitted to at FBI headquarters early last month, according to the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff of California.


The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee also confirmed receiving a package of records from the FBI about the Clinton email probe.

"The FBI has turned over a 'number of documents' related to their investigation of former Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email server. Committee staff is currently reviewing the information that is classified SECRET. There are no further details at this time,” a spokesperson for the House Oversight Committee said on Tuesday afternoon.

The handover of the records all but guarantees the email issue will continue to dog Clinton this election cycle, although it is unclear what Republicans can do with them, given that they are classified materials. Still, her decision to set up a private server at the State Department, and the subsequent fallout, remains a sizable self-inflicted wound for Clinton, even as Donald Trump's various missteps have found him lagging behind the Democrat in national and battleground state polls.

As it sent the materials up on Tuesday, the FBI warned publicly against leaking the documents.

"The material contains classified and other sensitive information and is being provided with the expectation it will not be disseminated or disclosed without FBI concurrence," an FBI spokesperson said in a statement.

But top Republicans are already pushing back, urging the FBI to publicly release of some of the information.

“On initial review, it seems that much of the material given to the Senate today, other than copies of the large number of emails on Secretary Clinton’s server containing classified information, is marked ‘unclassified/for official use.’ The FBI should make as much of the material available as possible," said Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) in a statement. "The public’s business ought to be public, with few exceptions. The people’s interest would be served in seeing the documents that are unclassified. The FBI has made public statements in describing its handling of the case, so sharing documents in support of those statements wherever appropriate would make sense."

In a statement, Clinton's presidential campaign stopped short of criticizing the FBI for disclosing the materials to Congress but questioned the GOP lawmakers' motives in seeking the records and urged that the files be made public.

"This is an extraordinarily rare step that was sought solely by Republicans for the purposes of further second-guessing the career professionals at the FBI," Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said. "We believe that if these materials are going to be shared outside the Justice Department, they should be released widely so that the public can see them for themselves, rather than allow Republicans to mischaracterize them through selective, partisan leaks."

Vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine offered the same reasoning as Fallon in an interview with Savannah Guthrie scheduled to air Wednesday on NBC's "Today."

"Anything that the FBI gives to Congress, they should give to the public," Kaine told Guthrie. "Because what we've seen is this lengthy, multi-million dollar congressional investigation that has been highly partisan, where they've wanted to leak out this or that to try to make their case against Hillary Clinton. Let the public see what the FBI decides to let Congress see."

The FBI not only gave details about the contents of the documents, but it appeared that the law enforcement agency also sent the interview reports — also known as 302s — to Congress without acceding to the State Department's request to see the records first.

But, during congressional testimony last month, FBI Director James Comey said that portions of Clinton's interview were classified up to the "top secret/sensitive compartmented information" level, which would sharply reduce access to the documents on Capitol Hill.

A State Department spokesman said Tuesday his agency had approved sending Congress some emails related to the probe, but that the agencies had not yet come to terms about how to handle FBI notes of interviews with Clinton and other former and current State employees.

"We have been provided with emails the FBI intends to give to Congress, and we’ve reviewed them," State spokesman Mark Toner told reporters.

Toner said State was "satisfied" that the emails being sent to Congress were subject to "appropriate handling rules or controls." However, he said the FBI had not yet agreed to State's request to see the interview notes to review them for State "equities" through what he called "a time-honored tradition of interagency practice."

"My understanding is we have not received those summaries," Toner said. "My understanding is that we continue to work with the FBI ... on those interview summaries — those 302s, I guess that they’re known as."

Toner confirmed later Tuesday that despite the requests for consultation, the interview summaries had been sent to Congress without review by State.

Comey committed to delivering to Congress “everything I can possibly give you under the law and to doing it as quickly as possible” during his July 7 testimony before the House Oversight panel on the investigation into Clinton’s email practices and handling of classified materials while she was secretary of state.

That hearing came just two days after a news conference in which Comey said the FBI would not recommend charges against Clinton but added that the investigation had turned up information that Clinton and her colleagues were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” The FBI director said the investigation turned up no direct evidence that Clinton’s home-brew email server had been compromised by hackers but also said that “given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence.”

Schiff said it was appropriate for Congress to see the emails the FBI recovered from Clinton's server but said the handover of the broader investigative file was unwise.

"With the exception of the classified emails that had been found on the private server, I can see little legitimate purpose to which Congress will put these materials. Instead, as the now-discredited Benghazi Committee demonstrated, their contents will simply be leaked for political purposes," the California Democrat said.

"This will neither serve the interests of justice nor aid Congress in its responsibilities and will merely set a precedent for the FBI to turn over closed case files whenever one party in Congress does not like a prosecutorial decision. This has been done in the name of transparency, but as this precedent chills the cooperation of other witnesses in the future, I suspect the Department of Justice will later come to refer to it by a different name — mistake," Schiff added.

While the precise inventory of what the FBI sent Congress on Tuesday was not immediately revealed, the law enforcement agency did send Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings of Maryland a letter defending investigators' work on the Clinton email probe.

In the letter, FBI Congressional Affairs official Jason Herring disputed Republicans' contention that Clinton should have known some emails in her account were classified because three of them contained paragraph markings of "(C)" — an abbreviation which means the information in that paragraph is classified at the "Confidential" level.

"The fact that Secretary Clinton received emails containing '(C)' portion markings is not clear evidence of knowledge or intent," Herring wrote. "In each of [the three] instances, the Secretary did not originate the information; instead, the emails were forwarded to her by staff members, with the portion-marked information located within the emails chains and without header and footer markings indicating the presence of classified information."

However, Herring also said the decision not to prosecute Clinton or anyone else over the emails did not mean there would be no official consequences.

"The FBI is in the process of providing relevant information to other U.S. Government agencies to conduct further security and administrative reviews they deem appropriate for their respective employees," the FBI official wrote. He did not elaborate on which staffers' conduct was being questioned, but he said such behavior "would be a significant factor" if one of the officials were to seek a job at the FBI.

Reports of the planned release of the FBI’s investigative files on Clinton to Congress or the public also drew complaints from some former Justice Department officials that doing so would set a bad precedent. Ron Weich, dean of the University of Baltimore Law School and a former assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Justice Department, said “the Hill wants to second-guess the investigation. Congress wants to put on their Sherlock Holmes hats and decide whether Hillary Clinton should've been indicted.”

"It's important that the FBI and Justice Department be able to gather evidence and deliberate about potential culpability without fearing that material will be viewed by the public,” Weich said. “Congress needs to stay out of law enforcement. Their job is to pass laws, and the executive branch's job is to carry them out. For me, this is very straightforward."

Since Comey’s announcement and subsequent testimony, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and others in the GOP have continued to hammer Clinton over the controversy. The Manhattan billionaire has suggested that America’s international adversaries probably have a “blackmail file” on Clinton, something he said should disqualify her from the presidency.

Trump has also regularly asked Clinton to release the more than 30,000 emails she deleted from her private server because she said they were personal, mostly pertaining to her daughter’s wedding or yoga. At a news conference earlier this month, Trump publicly appealed to Russian hackers to search for those emails, for which they would “probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Louis Nelson contributed to this report.

