Hillary Rodham Clinton will turn over the personal email server she used while serving as secretary of state to the Justice Department, her campaign spokesman said Tuesday.
The decision advances the investigation into the Democratic presidential frontrunner’s use of a private email account while working as the nation’s top diplomat, and whether classified information was improperly stored on her home email server.
Clinton had previously refused demands from Republican critics to turn over the server to a third party.
Spokesman Nick Merrill said Clinton has “pledged to cooperate with the government’s security inquiry, and if there are more questions, we will continue to address them.”
Also on Tuesday, Clinton gave the Justice Department thumb drives containing copies of emails sent to and from her personal email addresses via that server.
Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, gave three drives containing copies of roughly 30,000 emails to the FBI after the agency determined he could not remain in possession of the classified information contained in some of the emails, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The State Department previously had said it was comfortable with Kendall keeping the emails at his Washington law office.
The FBI is looking into the security of the Clinton email arrangement. There is no evidence she used encryption to shield the emails from foreign intelligence services or other prying eyes.
Word that Hillary Clinton had relented on giving up possession of the server, which she has previously said she wiped clean, came as Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said two emails that traversed Clinton’s personal system were deemed “Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information” — a rating that is among the government’s highest classifications.
Grassley said the inspector general of the nation’s intelligence community had reported the new details about the higher classification to Congress on Tuesday.
Those two emails were among four that had previously been determined by the inspector general of the intelligence community to have been classified at the time they were sent. In a statement, the State Department disputes the claim: “Department employees circulated these emails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011 and ultimately some were forwarded to Secretary Clinton,” the statement says. “They were not marked as classified.”