The recent change in the investigation was an effort to harass diplomats for doing their job, several people told the Post, as Trump had made Clinton’s use of private email servers during her tenure as secretary of state a staple of his 2016 presidential campaign rhetoric.
There is no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe or Hunter Biden.
House Democrats this past week launched a formal impeachment inquiry into the President.
The former official told CNN he first received a letter by mail from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security in January 2018, years after leaving the government. The letter alerted him that some of his emails sent on the unclassified system should have been sent on a classified system.
Then on August 5, another letter from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security was sent — this time in an email — informing him of the change in status of the emails.
“It has been determined that, at the time they were sent, a number of these emails contained classified information which were not property marked as such,” the letter stated.
The official told CNN that it appeared to him the emails were reviewed again, but with a stricter criteria because more emails were flagged in the second letter that the agency said should have been labeled classified. The official said he has talked to multiple former and current State Department colleagues who received a new letter and that there is a lot of confusion among them about why this is happening now.
Those targeted, including senior officials as well as others in lower-level jobs, have been notified that emails they sent years ago have been retroactively classified and now are potential security violations, the newspaper said.
While a former senior US official familiar with the email investigation told the Post that the email investigation is a way for Republicans “to keep the Clinton email issue alive,” senior State Department officials countered to the newspaper that they are following standard protocol in an investigation that began before Trump became President.
An FBI investigation found that of the 30,000 emails Clinton provided in 2014 to the State Department from her server, 110 contained classified information at the time they were sent or received. The agency did not recommend charges against Clinton, though then-FBI Director James Comey rebuked her and her aides for being “extremely careless.”
CNN’s Kate Sullivan and Caroline Kelly contributed to this report.
Source : CNN