State Department Pulls Hillary Clinton's Security Clearance at Her Request
The State Department revoked former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security clearance at her request, according to a letter from the State Department to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley.
The letter dated Sept. 21, but released on Friday, indicates that Clinton’s security clearance had been “administratively withdrawn on August 30, 2018.”
Additionally, on Sept. 20, 2018, the clearances of five others associated with Clinton, including her former chief of staff Cheryl Mills, were also pulled.
The four other names were redacted from the document.
“As we previously informed the committee, these individuals had been granted access to classified information through a request made by Secretary Clinton designating them as researchers,” wrote Charles Faulkner, the acting assistant secretary of legislative affairs, in the letter to Grassley.
The revelation by the State Department came over a year after the chairman had requested to know the security clearance status of Clinton and other current and former department employees.
The Hill reported that conservatives have long argued the former secretary of state should lose her security clearance after it was revealed in the spring of 2015 that Clinton had used a private, unsecured, unauthorized email server while she was secretary of state.
When The New York Times first broke the story in March 2015, Clinton said that the email server contained “no classified material.”
Later in July 2015, after a review of some of her emails by the FBI, Clinton revised her story saying there were no emails deemed classified at the time they were sent or received.
In September 2015, she further changed her story saying there were no emails marked classified on her server.
Clinton also claimed she had turned over all her work-related emails to the State Department after leaving office.
An FBI investigation found all these claims to be false.
In a statement to the media in July 2016, former FBI Director James Comey stated that the bureau found 110 emails containing classified information, including eight that were top secret at the time that they were sent.
“The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014,” he said.
Overall, the FBI determined that Clinton and her colleagues were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
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