Majority of young whites say Hillary Clinton intentionally breaks law: poll

A majority of young white Americans believe that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton intentionally broke the law when handling her private email account during her stint at U.S. State Department, showed a new poll.

The new GenForward poll found that among young white adults between the ages of 18 and 30, 54 percent say the former U.S. secretary of state intentionally committed a crime. Only 17 percent say Clinton did it unintentionally.

By contrast, the poll found that young non-white Americans view Clinton more favourably. However, there are still 32 percent of Hispanics, 29 percent of Asian-Americans and 21 percent of African-Americans who think Clinton intentionally broke the law.

Among all young American adults, 43 percent say Clinton intentionally committed a crime, said the poll.

The poll came at a time when Clinton was scrambling to win over support of young voters after a bruised primary season.

While Clinton won overwhelmingly among older voters, her rival in the nomination race, Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, dominated her among younger voters.

According to a recent study by Tufts University, more than 2 million young voters cast ballots for Sanders in 21 U.S. states by June 1 while roughly 760,000 young voters voted for Clinton.

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said last month that Clinton would not face criminal charges for her private email setup during her stint in the U.S. State Department after the Federal Bureau of Investigation's year-long probe.

In March 2015, Clinton acknowledged that she had exchanged about 60,000 emails from her private email account during her stint in the Obama administration, among which about half were personal and thus deleted.

All emails were sent and received via a private email server based at Clinton's home.

The controversy surrounding Clinton's email practices burst into public view in August, 2015 after the inspector general for the U.S. intelligence community revealed that two of the thousands of emails held by Clinton contained top-secret information.

A federal investigation was thus triggered to see whether Clinton had mishandled classified information.

(APD)