Justice Department in possession of Hillary Clinton's email server
The email server Hillary Clinton used when she was secretary of state was turned over to the Department of Justice on Wednesday around 4 p.m., CBS News' Jan Crawford confirms.
Barbara J. Wells, an attorney for Platte River Networks, which has overseen Clinton's private email system since 2013, told Crawford the server was picked up from a third-party data center in New Jersey. It was handed over voluntarily, without a subpoena or search warrant.
The news was first reported by the Washington Post.
Wells also confirmed that the old server is blank, and she said she does not believe it contains any usable information.
"To our knowledge, the data on the old server is not available now on any device or server in Platte River's control," she said.
At some point, the data on the old server was migrated to another computer system, Wells explained. She told the Post that transfer occurred in 2013.
A thumb drive containing Clinton's emails that was in the possession of her attorney, David Kendall, was also recently turned over to investigators.
Clinton's decision to hand over the server came after the intelligence community's inspector general informed Congress that multiple emails that made their way through the server contained classified information.
Clinton has faced months of criticism for her use of a private email server as secretary of state, with Republicans raising the possibility that she broke federal archiving rules for the sake of maintaining absolute control over the privacy of her correspondence.
Clinton initially refused requests to turn the server over to an independent third party, saying she'd already given the State Department all of her work-related emails that needed to be archived, and she deleted the rest.
"The server contains personal communications from my husband and me, and I believe I have met all of my responsibilities and the server will remain private," she said in March, after the controversy over the private server was lit by a New York Times report.
Now, however, amid questions about whether any classified information was put at risk because of her use of a private server, Clinton has agreed to turn the server over to the FBI.
The inspector general found in a limited review of 40 emails that at least four "contained classified information when they were generated" and "should never have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system."
On Tuesday, the State Department said the inspector general determined that two of those four emails "should be upgraded to the top secret level," one of the highest levels of classification.
The communications director for Clinton's presidential campaign, Jennifer Palmieri, explained further in a note to supporters on Wednesday.
"It's common for information previously considered unclassified to be upgraded to classified before being publicly released," she wrote. "Some emails that weren't secret at the time she sent or received them might be secret now. And sometimes government agencies disagree about what should be classified, so it isn't surprising that another agency might want to conduct its own review, even though the State Department has repeatedly confirmed that Hillary's emails contained no classified information at the time she sent or received them."
Whatever the explanation, the continued focus on Clinton's email practices has been an unwelcome distraction for her campaign, which has struggled to refocus the narrative on Clinton's policy proposals.
"This kind of nonsense comes with the territory of running for president. We know it, Hillary knows it, and we expect it to continue from now until Election Day," Palmieri said in her note. "It's okay. We'll be ready. We have the facts, our principles, and you on our side."