WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 (Xinhua) — The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Tuesday sent to U.S. Congress documents related to its investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email setup.
The documents were submitted amid Republicans' assertion that Clinton may have committed perjury during her congressional hearing last October.
A statement released by the FBI did not elaborate on what documents had been sent to Congress, but a report by The Wall Street Journal on Monday said notes of the FBI's interviews with Clinton and her several senior aides, as well as copies of the 110 emails that contained classified information at the time when they were sent or received via Clinton's private email system, were expected to be among the files.
All material could not be released publicly and was presented to U.S. lawmakers as classified information.
"The material contains classified and other sensitive information and is being provided with the expectation it will not be disseminated or disclosed without FBI concurrence," said the FBI statement.
However, the Clinton campaign soon expressed concerns that Republicans would cherry-pick the material to discredit Clinton, who is still scrambling to erase a trust deficit among voters.
"We believe that if these materials are going to be shared outside the Justice Department, they should be released widely so that the public can see them for themselves, rather than allow Republicans to mischaracterize them through selective, partisan leaks," said the Clinton campaign in a statement.
During her hearing last October at the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Clinton, now the Democratic presidential nominee for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, said there was nothing "marked classified on my emails, either sent or received."
During a congressional hearing in July, FBI Director James Comey disclosed that three emails were marked "classified" when handled via Clinton's private email system.
He later acknowledged that all the three emails were not properly marked, which may lead to the impression that they were not classified. ' As a result of the disclosure, Republicans had since July asserted that the FBI investigation documents would show that Clinton committed perjury in her congressional hearing last October.
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.
