The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee denied on Wednesday that he leaked a letter laying out nonpublic findings of an inspector general that Hillary Clinton had highly classified material on her private emails.
Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., told reporters that he had been in touch with Charles McCullough, the intelligence community’s inspector general, earlier last year when he and Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the chairman of Foreign Relations Committee, asked him to determine whether Clinton’s server and thumb-drive were secure. Clinton’s camp has since accused McCullough of conspiring with Republicans to leak out his finding.
“From the standpoint of any additional letters that Bob and I have seen from them, it’s strictly follow-up to the original and an update to where they are and their interactions with the [intelligence community],” Burr told reporters Wednesday.
Asked about the Clinton campaign’s accusation that Burr leaked the contents of the IG’s letter asserting that she had highly classified material on her private emails to Fox News, Burr was blunt: “The Clinton campaign would be wrong.”
He would not discuss the contents of anything of McCullough has sent to him, noting that “even the unclassified version is committee-sensitive so it’s not releasable from my standpoint.”
Brian Fallon, Clinton’s campaign spokesman, earlier Wednesday accused Burr and Corker of a “very coordinated leak” aimed at hurting Clinton’s image. He also charged McCullough with trying to rebuild his reputation after a report in Politico last year challenged some of his findings.
“So I think he put two Republican senators up to sending him a letter so that he would have an excuse to resurface the same allegations he made back in the summer that have been discredited,” Fallon told CNN’s “New Day.”
In McCullough’s letter to Burr and Corker, he said Clinton had sent or received information classified above top secret. Fallon argues that the email McCullough was referring to was nothing more than a New York Times story about drones that had been forwarded to Clinton.
“I think most Americans, if they saw the actual emails, would agree that it is a fabrication to suggest the forwarding of a news article should be treated as a mishandling of classified information,” Fallon argued.
