State Dept. employee who set up Hillary Clinton's email server receives immunity: report
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a Democratic Party presidential candidate forum on Nov. 6, 2015. [YouTube]

The U.S. Department of Justice has given immunity to a State Department employee who set up an email server for former Secretary of State and current Democratic presidential front-runner candidate Hillary Clinton, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.


A senior U.S. law enforcement official said the FBI had secured the cooperation of Bryan Pagliano, who worked on Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009, the newspaper reported. (http://wapo.st/1RqkIk2)

Last month, a federal judge ruled that State Department officials and aides to Clinton should be questioned under oath about whether her use of a private email system was an effort to skirt open records laws.

The ruling added to the uncertainty hovering over Clinton about the legal consequences of her decision to use a private email server in her home for her government work.

The FBI is investigating the decision to use a private server and is likely in coming months to ask Clinton and her aides how it was set up and whether any of the participants knew they were sending classified information in emails, the Post reported.

Clinton returned about 30,000 emails to the State Department in 2014, but said she deleted thousands of others her staff deemed not to be work-related.

(Reporting by Eric Walsh; Editing by Sandra Maler)