Former FBI Director James Comey and other bureau officials used private email accounts for government business while investigating Hillary Clinton's personal server use, the Justice Department's inspector general concluded Thursday.
"We identified numerous instances in which Comey used a personal email account a [Gmail account] to conduct FBI business," Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in his 500-page report released Thursday.
The document also found that FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page used their personal email accounts on multiple occasions to conduct official business.
In Comey's case, he forwarded an email in November 2016 with the subject line "Midyear thoughts" to his personal account from his government account.
The document detailed Comey's reasoning for informing Congress the FBI had restarted its Clinton investigation after initially finding no wrongdoing.
Comey, whom President Donald Trump fired in May 2017, announced he was reopening the probe 11 days before the presidential election.
A month later, Comey forwarded another email to his personal account that put forth responses to two requests for information from the office of special counsel.
Comey told Horowitz he did not use his personal email or laptop for sensitive or classified information — and he had no concerns regarding security in using a personal account.
"It was incidental and I was always making sure that the work got forwarded to the government account to either my own account or [Jim] Rybicki, so I wasn't worried from a record-keeping perspective," he said, according to the report.
Regarding Strzok and Page's of their private accounts, Horowitz said: "Most troubling, on October 29, 2016, Strzok forwarded from his FBI account to his personal email account an email about the proposed search warrant the Midyear team was seeking on the [Anthony] Weiner laptop.
"The email included a draft of the search warrant affidavit, which contained information from the Weiner investigation that appears to have been under seal at the time," Horowitz said.
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