Hillary Clinton Emails Take Long Path to Controversy

[applegrove]

Hillary Clinton Emails Take Long Path to Controversy

By SCOTT SHANE and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT by the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/us/hillary-clinton-emails-take-long-path-to-controversy.html?smid=fb-share

"SNIP..............


Whether Americans believe Mrs. Clinton’s decision to use only a private email account for her public business is a troubling scandal well worth an F.B.I. inquiry, a pragmatic move blown out of proportion by Republican enemies, or something in between, may depend more on their partisan leanings than the facts of the affair itself.

But the email account and its confusing reverberations have become a significant early chapter in the 2016 presidential race and a new stroke in the portrait of the Democrats’ leading candidate.

Interviews with former State Department officials, law enforcement and intelligence officials, experts on classified information and members of Congress provide further insight into how the controversy developed and where it might lead.

Mrs. Clinton, who has said she now regrets her unorthodox decision to keep private control of her official messages, is not a target in the F.B.I.’s investigation, which is focused on assessing security breaches. Against the backdrop of other current government computer security lapses, notably the large-scale theft of files from the Office of Personnel Management, most specialists believe the occasional appearance of classified information in the Clinton account was probably of marginal consequence.



..............SNIP"