WASHINGTON
The chairman of the Senate’s homeland security committee has asked a small, 13-year-old Denver technology company that managed tens of thousands of emails for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to describe what measures it took to safeguard national security information.
The FBI, which has embarked on its own scrutiny of Clinton’s private server, also has shown interest in the company, Platte River Networks, which began managing Clinton’s emails in 2013, according to published reports.
Her use of a private, non-governmental server to conduct official State Department business is causing increased turbulence for Clinton as she pursues what many thought would be a relatively smooth ride to the Democratic presidential nomination.
Clinton said late Tuesday that she would turn over to the Justice Department her private server as part of a widening security investigation into her use of private emails to conduct official business. McClatchy reported Tuesday that two emails found on Clinton’s server were classified as “Top Secret,” heightening concerns that Clinton may have improperly shared classified information or stored them on vulnerable Internet equipment that might be open to hacking.
“Given that the server was used to conduct official State Department business, questions have been raised regarding whether classified information was stored on the private server,” Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin wrote Platte’s president in a letter Tuesday. He said he also wants to know “if that data was secure, who had access to that material and whether all official documents were appropriately preserved.”
Clinton has said that after she turned over all of her official emails to the State Department last December, she wiped clean her server which contained over 61,000 emails. Clinton said she permanently deleted about half because they were personal and turned over the rest because they were related to State Department business. Senior Republicans in Congress now want to know whether Platte River has a backup file containing the deleted emails.
