Hillary Clinton: IG's Urge Justice Department to Probe Her Emails
Some of those messages may have contained classified information.
— -- An internal government review of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's controversial private email account concluded that some of those messages contained classified information, senior government officials confirm to ABC News.
The inspectors general for the State Department and Intelligence Community have sent a "referral" to the Justice Department, notifying it of potential national security concerns.
The Justice Department clarified today that the referral is not criminal in nature. The main concern is that classified information could be compromised because it was sent over unsecured networks and remains in the hands of Clinton's legal team, a spokesman for the Intelligence Community's IG told ABC News today.
The purpose of notifying the Justice Department was to inform the FBI of "a potential compromise of classified information," spokesman Andrea Williams said.
It was not intended to seek a criminal probe, Williams added.
In a memorandum to the State Department's Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy, the inspectors general said a review of Clinton's emails revealed "hundreds of potentially classified emails within the collection.”
It also states that officials within the Intelligence Community confirmed that “that several of these emails contained classified IC information, though they were not marked as classified.”
Williams clarified that the intelligence community found four emails out of a batch of 40 that it reviewed containing classified information.
The Clinton campaign said in a statement that Clinton had "followed appropriate practices in dealing with classified materials."
When it was revealed early in her presidential campaign that she had exclusively used a personal email account during her tenure as Secretary of State, Clinton responded by turning over 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department and asking that it make them public. At the time, she claimed that none of them contained classified information.
Since then the State Department has been working with its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office to release those emails in tranches, 3,000 of which have already been made public on its website.
The Intelligence Community says that one of those 3,000 emails the State Department put on its FOIA website contained classified information, a concern they also expressed to the Justice Department.
The State Department disputes that claim and maintains that nothing classified in nature has been released to the public.
The Justice Department has not yet decided how it will respond to the the referral.
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