As I said, folks can disagree about that, but I hope they know that view – not just my view, but of my team – was honestly held, fairly investigated and communicated with unusual transparency because we know folks care about it.
Advertisement
“I know from 30 years with the Department of Justice, they have grave concerns about whether it’s appropriate to prosecute somebody for gross negligence, which is why they’ve done it once that I know of, in a case involving espionage”.
That said, both reports also contained damning information likely to convince Clinton critics unreservedly that she is unfit for the Oval Office.
“In addition to this highly sensitive information, we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community, at the time it was discussed on email”. That is excluding any later up-classified emails.
And indeed, despite the fact that even he admitted that “there is a perceived gap between the things you said and your recommendation on Tuesday”, Cummings asserted with a straight face that the proceedings were a “partisan circus” – moments before suggesting that hearings on “gun massacres” and police killings of blacks would be a better way to spend their time. Only a very small number of the emails here containing classified information wore markings that indicated the presence of classified information.
FBI Director James Comey is facing growing Republican calls to launch a perjury probe into whether Hillary Clinton lied under oath about her email use when she testified previous year before the House Benghazi committee – even as the Justice Department closes the case on the former secretary of state’s private server. Blum emphasized that people are paid roughly $180 to hack into a Gmail account, suggesting that it is relatively easy to do so, and that Clinton’s server was extraordinarily unprotected from potential foreign hackers. And this sordid email affair illustrates that Lady Justice is not only blind, but she’s also deaf and dumb. “Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account”.
Comey gave his most detailed explanation to date about why the Justice Department concluded without charges a yearlong investigation that had dogged Clinton’s presidential campaign and raised questions for voters about her trustworthiness. He said there was no evidence that she knew that anything she was doing was against the law or had lied to federal investigators.
He drew distinctions between the Clinton probe and last year’s prosecution of former CIA Director David Petraeus, who pleaded guilty to sharing classified information with his biographer.
The State Department said on Thursday it would conduct an internal review of Clinton’s handling of the emails now that the FBI investigation was over. “That is the characteristic of all the prosecutions involving the mishandling of classified information”. We do not see those things here. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. People who aren’t Hillary Clinton.
Advertisement
Republicans at the hearing, however, seemed much more with the rule of law, and the consequences the country faced from Clinton’s mishandling of classified information.
