6/9 Reuters Emails in Clinton Probe Dealt with Planned Drone Strikes [View all]

[grasswire]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Emails between U.S. diplomats in Islamabad and State Department officials in Washington about whether to challenge specific U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan are at the center of a criminal probe involving Hillary Clinton's handling of classified information, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

The 2011 and 2012 emails were sent via the "low side" -government slang for a computer system for unclassified matters - as part of a secret arrangement that gave the State Department more of a voice in whether a CIA drone strike went ahead, according to congressional and law enforcement officials briefed on the FBI probe, the Journal said.

Some of the emails were then forwarded by Clinton's aides to her personal email account, which routed them to a server she kept at her home in suburban New York when she was secretary of state, the officials said, according to the newspaper.

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The emails were written within the often-narrow time frame in which State Department officials had to decide whether or not to object to drone strikes before the CIA pulled the trigger, the officials said, according to the Wall Street Journal.