Clinton email probe finds no deliberate mishandling of material

WASHINGTON — A years-long State Department investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server found that while the use of the system for official business increased the risk of compromising classified information, there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information.

The inquiry, started more than three years ago, found that 38 current or former State Department officials were “culpable” of violating security procedures in a review of about 33,000 individual emails sent to or from the server that Clinton turned over to investigators.

The report, completed last month and shared with Congress last week, appears to bookend a controversy that dogged Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign against Donald Trump. Clinton blamed the FBI’s handling of the inquiry for crippling her campaign after James Comey, then the bureau’s director, reopened his investigation into the server days before the general election after initially declining to bring charges.

“While there were some instances of classified information being inappropriately introduced into an unclassified system in furtherance of expedience,” the report said, “by and large, the individuals interviewed were aware of security policies and did their best to implement them in their operations.”

The report concluded, “There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”

State Department investigators reviewed thousands of pages of documents, sent from 2009 to 2013, when Clinton served in the Obama administration. The emails were on subjects that were not considered classified at the time, but that have been or were retroactively marked as classified. Investigators also took statements from hundreds of past and present department officials, and...