38 individuals violated classification rules in Clinton email probe

An investigation by the State Department released on Friday said 38 individuals employed at one time by the State Department sent classified emails to Hillary Clinton’s private email server and found nearly 100 violations of classification rules.

An unclassified report detailing the investigation was sent to Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican and a member fo the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he released it publicly Friday afternoon. The Associated Press was first to report on the findings.

The investigation found 91 separate violations of classification rules. The report said the use of personal email by Clinton posed an “increased risk of unauthorized disclosure.”

“While the use of a private email system itself did not necessarily increase the likelihood of classified information being transmitted on unclassified systems, those incidents, which then resulted in the presence of classified information upon it, carried an increased risk of compromise or inadvertent disclosure,” the report stated.

But, it added that those interviewed for the report were aware of security precautions that were needed.

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

After the FBI closed its investigation of Clinton’s email server in 2016, State Department investigators, over the next three years, interviewed dozens of former and current State Department employees and reviewed thousands of pages of documents.

Neither the State Department nor representatives for Clinton had any immediate comment on the report.

A former US official who left the State Department in 2012 received a letter in August informing him that dozens of his emails sent to Clinton were now being recategorized as classified.

The letter marks one instance of what The Washington Post last month reported was a wide-scale reclassification of emails sent to Clinton’s private email by as many as 130 current and former senior State Department officials.