Spotlight: Hillary Clinton walks back main email defense in FBI interview

In what appeared to be a major departure from her previous defense on email practices while serving as the U.S. top diplomat, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton told FBI investigators in July that she did not ask permission for her private email setup, said an FBI file released on Friday.

In a rare move, the FBI released a 58-page document that included a summary of its interview with Clinton on July 2 on email probe and other details of its investigation into Clinton's use of the private email setup as secretary of state.

According to the interview summary, Clinton told federal investigators that she "did not explicitly request permission to use a private server or email address," contradicting her past public defense that her use of a private email account for business was allowed by the State Department.

In her interview with FBI investigators, Clinton said she believed "everyone at State" knew she had a personal email address, and she did not recall receiving any emails she thought should not be on an unclassified system.

"She relied on State officials to use their judgement when emailing her and could not recall anyone raising concerns with her regarding the sensitivity of the information she received at her email address," said the summary.

Meanwhile, the FBI file cited a 2011 notice to all State employees "sent on Clinton's behalf" that recommended employees not conducting State business via personal email accounts "due to information security concerns."

"Clinton stated she did not recall this specific notice, and she did not recall receiving any guidance from State regarding email policies," said the FBI file.

After a yearlong investigation, the FBI in July recommended no criminal charges against Clinton in its email probe, and the Justice Department then closed the investigation.

While the drop of any criminal charges dispelled a huge legal cloud over her presidential campaign, Clinton's trust deficit with voters only deteriorated.

In his congressional hearing in July, FBI Director James Comey told U.S. lawmakers that the FBI found no basis to conclude that Clinton had lied to the agency. However, he refused to comment on whether Clinton had lied to the public.

"That's a question I'm not qualified to answer. I can speak about what she said to the FBI," said Comey then.

Despite his reluctance to comment on whether Clinton had lied to the public, Comey revealed during that hearing that some of the former U.S. secretary of state's email defenses were false.

During her hearing last October at the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Clinton said there was nothing "marked classified on my emails, either sent or received."

"That's not true," said Comey during the hastily arranged hearing at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, two days after he announced the FBI's recommendation of not bringing any criminal charges against Clinton in her email investigation.

"There were a small number of portion markings on, I think, three of the documents," said Comey.

However, Comey later acknowledged that all the three emails were not properly marked, which may lead to the impression that they were not classified.

Moreover, when asked by Trey Gowdy, a Republican member of the committee, whether Clinton's statement that no classified material was transmitted through her private email account to others was true, Comey replied in the negative.

During his announcement of the FBI recommendation of no charges against Clinton in July, Comey in a rare step detailed major findings of the investigation, including the finding of 113 emails which contained classified information at the time they were sent or received through Clinton's private email system.

"Secretary Clinton said she used just one device. Was that true?" Gowdy, who also chaired a congressional panel investigating the 2012 deadly attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, asked at one point.

Again, Comey said Clinton's statement was false.

In his later exchange with Gowdy, Comey also confirmed that Clinton's insistence on having turned over all work-related emails and her statement about her lawyers having read the email content individually was not true.

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.

The controversy surrounding Clinton's email practices again burst into public view in August 2015 after the inspector general for the intelligence community revealed that two of the thousands of emails held by Clinton contained top-secret information. The revelation then trigged a federal investigation into whether Clinton had mishandled sensitive information. Endit