Hillary Clinton email security: 'FBI begins probing' set up of former secretary of state's private server

The security of her emails has been scrutinised since March

Hillary Clinton used a homebrew server (Getty Images)

FBI officials have started examining how secure devices which Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton used to access her emails were when she was the secretary of state, her lawyer has confirmed.

Last month, Charles McCullough, III, the inspector general of the US intelligence community, alerted the FBI that classified information sent to Clinton’s inbox could have been compromised, as it went through her personal home server.

Charles McCullough said that he discovered four emails containing classified information after investigating a limited sample of 40 of the tens of thousands of messages provided by Clinton.

The emails were not marked classified but should have been viewed as such, he said.

Damning correspondences which were uncovered included some sent by Sidney Blumenthal, a key confidant of Ms Clinton and a former White House aide to Bill Clinton, which described Prime Minister David Cameron as“aristocratic, unsure, inexperienced, oblique and largely uncommitted”. Meanwhile Boris Johnson was called a “Tory clown prince”.

He has since sought 30,000 emails in State Department possession to check that sufficient controls are in place to protect information of national importance.

Federal investigators have now asked David Kendall, Clinton’s lawyer, about the security of a USB drive containing Clinton’s work emails which were sent when she was secretary of state, which is now in his possession, the Washington Post reported.

The newspaper cited two anonymous government officials, who said Clinton was not being targeted by the FBI.

Clinton’s lawyer David Kendall said in a statement: “We are actively cooperating”.

Questions surrounding the security of Clinton’s emails were first posed after the Associated Press revealed in March that she had used a “homebrew” or private - server at her New York home. These types of servers are usually the preserve of the most tech-savvy, as it allows a person to send and receive emails without the need for going through companies such as Google or Yahoo.

Since then, government and congressional investigators have been attempting to confirm whether Clinton sent or received classified information on an unsecured email.

But Clinton has maintained that she never sent classified information on her personal email account, which she said she used merely for convenience. She also stressed when reports first emerged that she had “numerous safeguards” in place, and relied on the State Department to release documents.

Additional reporting by AP