The State Department revealed Monday that it has identified "multiple security incidents" involving current or former employees' handling of Hillary Clinton's emails, and that 23 "violations" and seven "infractions" have been issued as part of the department's ongoing investigation.
The information came in a letter to Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who is responsible for overseeing the security review.
"To this point, the Department has assessed culpability to 15 individuals, some of whom were culpable in multiple security incidents," Mary Elizabeth Taylor, the State Department's Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Legislative Affairs, wrote to Grassley. "DS has issued 23 violations and 7 infractions incidents. ... This number will likely change as the review progresses."
The State Department, calling the matter "serious," said it expected to conclude the investigation by Sept. 1. The department acknowledged that the probe was unusually time-consuming.
"Given the volume of emails provided to the Department from former Secretary Clinton's private email server, the Department's process has been necessarily more complicated and complex requiring a significant dedication of time and resources," Taylor wrote.
Taylor also noted that disciplinary consequences were pending.
And, last month, a trove of partially redacted FBI documents from the agency's investigation into whether Clinton mishandled classified information -- a probe known as the "Midyear Exam" -- revealed that top Clinton aides were shocked at apparent attempts to hack her private email servers.
The document release revealed numerous episodes in which the Clinton team either suspected it had been hacked or seemingly acknowledged that security measures had come up short.
And in March, it was revealed that the Justice Department "negotiated" an agreement with Clinton's legal team that ensured the FBI did not have access to emails on her private servers relating to the Clinton Foundation. Former FBI Agent Peter Strzok testified about the arrangement during a closed-door appearance before the House Judiciary Committee last summer, according to a transcript released this year.
"A significant filter team" was employed at the FBI, Strzok said, to "work through the various terms of the various consent agreements." Limitations imposed on agents' searches included date ranges and names of domains and people, Strzok said, among other categories.
The agreement was reached, Strzok said, because "according to the attorneys, we lacked probable cause to get a search warrant for those servers and projected that either it would take a very long time and/or it would be impossible to get to the point where we could obtain probable cause to get a warrant."
Former Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who chaired the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee until 2017 and is now a Fox News contributor, said the arrangement signaled that agents wanted willful blindness.
"What's bizarre about this, is in any other situation, there's no possible way they would allow the potential perpetrator to self-select what the FBI gets to see," Chaffetz said, noting that the FBI was aware that the servers contained classified information in unclassified settings. "The FBI should be the one to sort through those emails -- not the Clinton attorneys."
The DOJ's goal, Chaffetz said, was to "make sure they hear no evil, see no evil -- they had no interest in pursuing the truth."
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