The private email server belonging to Hillary Clinton was hacked by a Chinese-owned company, The Daily Caller reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.
The company, which operates in Washington DC and reportedly serves as a “front group” for the Chinese government, was allegedly able to obtain Clinton’s emails in real time thanks to code embedded in the server, which instantly created a “courtesy copy” of nearly all of the former state secretary’s emails and forwarded them to the hackers.
"When [the ICIG] did a very deep dive, they found in the actual metadata — the data which is at the header and footer of all the emails — that a copy, a ‘courtesy copy,’ was being sent to a third party and that third party was a known Chinese public company that was involved in collecting intelligence for China,” a former intelligence officer told the media outlet, adding that "something was embedded" in Clinton’s server.
However, Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton, told The Daily Caller that "the FBI spent thousands of hours investigating, and found no evidence of intrusion," describing Hillary Clinton’s private email server affair as "the most combed over subject in modern American political history."
READ MORE: Clinton Saga Continues: Watchdog Publishes New Batches of Hillary’s Emails
The Clinton email scandal erupted in March 2015, when The New York Times reported that the former secretary of state had used a personal account to conduct government business from 2009 to 2013, in violation of State Department rules.
On July 10, 2015, the FBI launched a full investigation into "potential unauthorized transmission and storage of classified information" on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's personal email server. The agency revealed that a substantial part of her correspondences contained classified information. Still, after a yearlong probe, FBI Director James Comey recommended no charges against Clinton on July 5, 2016.
In late October 2016, Comey resumed the probe into Clinton's emails after some of them had been found on a laptop owned by Anthony Weiner, the husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. A few days later, Comey stated that the FBI had not changed its previous conclusions with regard to the Democratic presidential nominee.