U.S. State Department to reopen internal Hillary Clinton email probe

The U.S. State Department announced on Thursday it would reopen an internal probe into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email setup while serving as U.S. secretary of state.

"Given the Department of Justice has now made its announcement, the State Department intends to conduct its internal review," State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement.

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced on Wednesday that Hillary Clinton would not face criminal charges for her private email setup during her stint in the U.S. State Department, adding that the federal investigation would come to an end.

Kirby on Thursday refused to provide specific information about the department's review. Neither did he present any deadline for the completion of the review.

The State Department said in April that it had suspended its plan for an internal review of whether Clinton mishandled classified information at the request of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which was then conducting a year-long investigation into the issue.

Lynch's decision came one day after FBI Director James Comey said his agency recommended no criminal charges against Clinton while he blasted the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for the 2016 U.S. election for being "extremely careless" in handling classified information.

Speaking at a press conference here on Tuesday, Comey said federal investigators found 113 emails which contained classified information at the time they were sent or received through Clinton's private email system.

Apart from the approximately 30,000 work-related emails Clinton turned over to the State Department in 2014, investigators also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not among the group of 30,000 e-mails, said Comey.

However, Comey said there was no clear evidence that Clinton and her aides intended to violate the law.

"Although there is evidence of potential violation of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case," said Comey.

In March 2015, Clinton acknowledged that she had exchanged about 60,000 emails from her private email account during her stint in the Obama administration, among which about half were personal and thus deleted.

All emails were sent and received via a private email server based at Clinton's home.

In response to requests from the State Department, the Clinton camp turned over the other half, roughly 30,000 emails in total, to the State Department in December 2014. Endi