The Department of Justice has been asked by two inspectors general to open a criminal investigation into the handling of Hillary Clinton's private emails during her time as secretary of state.

The department has not yet decided whether it will open an investigation, which would look into whether sensitive government information was mishandled with the private email account Clinton used while working in the State Department, according to the New York Times.

It was revealed in March that Clinton used a private email account instead of an official government one while conducting business as secretary of state. She has repeated that the emails turned over to the government were all the necessary official business emails and the emails she deleted were strictly personal emails.

The request for the criminal investigation by the Justice Department comes after a June 29 memo from the inspectors general to Patrick F. Kennedy, the undersecretary of state for management, that said Clinton's private email account held "hundreds of potentially classified emails."

It is not yet clear if any of the information in the emails was considered classified by the State Department when Clinton sent or received them.

The State Department is reviewing some 55,000 pages of Clinton emails. A first batch of 3,000 pages was made public June 30.

A second July 17 memo to Kennedy reveals that the inspectors general said at that at least one email made public by the State Department contained classified information, but did not reveal which email or its contents.

"She followed appropriate practices in dealing with classified materials," Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said in a statement early Friday. "As has been reported on multiple occasions, any released emails deemed classified by the administration have been done so after the fact, and not at the time they were transmitted," he said.