American government investigators have confirmed that classified information has been found in the private email account that 2016 Democratic presidential hopeful and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
According to the New York Times, these investigators have unequivocally stated that those secrets never should have been stored outside of secure government computer systems, thus countering Clinton's claim that she kept no classified data on her private server at home.
Clinton's campaign team was quoted by the paper, as saying Friday that any government secrets found on the server had been classified after the fact.
But the inspectors general of the State Department and the nation's intelligence agencies said the information they found was classified when it was sent and remains so now.
"This classified information never should have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system," Steve A. Linick, the State Department inspector general, said in a statement signed by him and I. Charles McCullough III, the inspector general for the intelligence community.
Information is considered classified if its disclosure would likely harm national security, and such information can be sent or stored only on computer networks with special safeguards.