Hillary Clinton to turn over personal email server

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 front-runner's use of a private email account as the nation's top diplomat, and whether classified information was improperly stored on her home-brew email server.

Clinton had previously refused demands from Republican critics to turn over the server to a third party.

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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 Tuesday, Clinton gave to 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 thumb 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 or her personal server from foreign intelligence services or other prying eyes.

Emails turned over earlier this year

Word that 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. The State Department disputes that the emails were classified at that time.

Earlier this year, Clinton turned over to the State Department roughly 55,000 pages of emails she sent and received via her private email server. The department is reviewing those emails and has begun the process of releasing them to the public.

"As she has said, it is her hope that State and the other agencies involved in the review process will sort out as quickly as possible which emails are appropriate to release to the public, and that the release will be as timely and transparent as possible," Merrill said Tuesday.

Clinton has also said she destroyed thousands of others emails sent via her personal server that she deemed were not work-related.

The inspector general for the intelligence community had told Congress that potentially hundreds of classified emails are among the cache that Clinton provided to the State Department.