FBI Director James Comey says the FBI will not recommend criminal charges in its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.
Comey made the announcement Tuesday, three days after FBI agents interviewed Clinton in a final step of its investigation.
“We cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges,” Comey said at a news conference late Tuesday morning, after describing the “painstaking” investigation.
“Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
But Comey also said Clinton and her colleagues at the Department of State had been “extremely careless” with classified material — noting that 110 emails, in 52 different email chains, contained classified information when Clinton sent them. Eight of those chains contained top secret information, he said.
“None of these emails should have been on any kind of unclassified system,” he said.
FBI Director James Comey said Hillary Clinton and her colleagues had been ‘extremely careless’ with classified material. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
The Justice Department has been looking into whether anyone mishandled classified information that flowed through Clinton’s email server.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch said last week that she would accept the recommendations of Comey and of career prosecutors.
Although Comey’s announcement removes the threat of criminal charges, it’s unlikely to eliminate concerns about Clinton’s trustworthiness.
“To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences,” Comey allowed. “To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.”
The recommendation almost certainly won’t stop Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump from continuing to make the server a campaign issue. Within moments, Trump alleged the system was “rigged” in Clinton’s favour.
FBI director said Crooked Hillary compromised our national security. No charges. Wow! #RiggedSystem
Clnton’s personal email server, which she relied on exclusively for government and personal business, has dogged her campaign since The Associated Press revealed its existence in March 2015.
She has repeatedly said that no email she sent or received was marked classified, but the Justice Department began investigating last summer following a referral from the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence community.
Critical audit
The scrutiny was compounded by a critical audit in May from the State Department’s inspector general, the agency’s internal watchdog, which said that Clinton and her team ignored clear warnings from department officials that her email setup violated federal standards and could leave sensitive material vulnerable to hackers. Clinton declined to talk to the inspector general, but the audit said that she had feared “the personal being accessible” if she used a government email account.
The Clinton campaign said agents interviewed her this past Saturday for three and one-half hours at FBI headquarters. Agents had earlier interviewed top Clinton aides including her former State Department chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, and Huma Abedin, a longtime aide who now is the vice chairwoman of Clinton’s campaign.
Lynch on Friday said that she would accept whatever findings and recommendations were presented to her. Though she said she had already settled on that process, her statement came days after an impromptu meeting with Bill Clinton on her airplane in Phoenix that she acknowledged had led to questions about the neutrality of the investigation.