On March 14, 2012, at 4:44am in Washington, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff received a CIA employee’s e-mail with the subject line: “URGENT—From Dave Petraeus’s Chief of Staff.”
Cheryl Mills forwarded the message mentioning the spy agency’s director less than an hour later to hrod17@clintonemail.com - the private e-mail account of the then secretary of state, whose maiden name is Rodham: “HRC See b/l Calling you re this around 715am.”
The message is one of more than 30,000 e-mails and documents made public by the Department of State. It is also one of thousands of messages marked classified that are now at the heart of an official investigation, one which could endanger Clinton’s White House dreams.
Should Clinton, on the cusp of winning the Democratic presidential nomination, ultimately be charged with mishandling classified data, she would find herself in the unprecedented position of campaigning for president while embroiled in a legal battle and under federal indictment.
The Central Intelligence Agency e-mail belongs to a group of 65 messages classified as “secret” and which have been partially redacted.
The content of the initial CIA e-mail was blacked out in the publicly released version, for reasons of national security.
Revelation of the e-mails, sent from and received by Clinton between 2009 and 2013, led the Federal Bureau of Investigation to launch a probe and begin questioning members of the inner circle of the woman who is now the likely Democratic standardbearer.
Mills and Huma Abedin, Clinton’s long-time confidante, have already undergone questioning, while The Washington Post reports that Clinton herself will be questioned soon.
The FBI investigation, whose breadth has never been officially confirmed, is nearing its end.
The law bars handling or transmitting classified information on an unsecure network because doing so could cause grave damage to national security.
But at the times the e-mails were sent and received by Clinton, they were not marked secret or confidential, she has insisted.
Federal law at the time did not forbid administration officials from conducting official business on personal accounts, although the practice was discouraged.
The classifications were made in hindsight and prior to public release after analysis by government officials.
The Clinton camp has contested the “over-classification” of some of the messages. One of them, related to North Korea and originally deemed “top secret”, was finally downgraded to “secret” and a redacted version was released publicly.
Once completed, the FBI investigation will be presented to the Justice Department, which will render a decision on whether or not to proceed with criminal charges.
To date, investigators have found no evidence that Clinton knowingly broke the law, officials told CNN.
But in the midst of a heated presidential campaign, Republicans have relentlessly used the scandal as a cudgel to dent the Democratic frontrunner’s reputation.