Washington, August 3 (RHC)-- Legal experts in the United States are mounting pressure on the U.S. Justice Department to open a criminal investigation against the Democratic presidential pre-candidate Hillary Clinton for mishandling sensitive government information.

Clinton used a private e-mail account to conduct State Department business during her time as secretary of state. The private account potentially put thousands of pages of State Department e-mails at risk, but it also shielded Clinton’s correspondence from congressional and Freedom of Information Act requests.

The Justice Department has not decided yet if it will open an investigation, officials say. Critics assert that Hillary Clinton’s conduct was far worse than the mishandling of classified information that saw David Petraeus, a former CIA director and celebrated military leader, sentenced to two years probation and a $100,000 fine.

“What Petraeus did was really small in comparison, because there was no exposure of any information to any foreign intelligence services,” Kevin Carroll, a former CIA officer and secrecy lawyer, told The Washington Times.

Petraeus, who oversaw U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, pleaded guilty to improperly sharing secret military files with his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell. Carroll claimed that transferring classified information through a personal server is a “very serious counterintelligence breach” and that the Justice Department should look at the damage that has been done to “every agency that’s had its intelligence compromised.”

Inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence agencies have also called for a criminal investigation following their assessment in a June 29 memo that Clinton’s private server contained “hundreds of potentially classified e-mails.”