In just a few weeks Hillary Clinton will stand on the Democratic convention stage and be formally announced as the party nominee.
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This morning, FBI investigators interviewed Hillary Clinton for three-and-a-half hours.
Clinton’s been tight-lipped about the reports she could be in the clear.
“Secretary Clinton gave a voluntary interview this morning about her email arrangements while she was secretary”, Nick Merrill, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said in a statement. Lynch Friday stopped short of recusing herself from the case, but said she regretted the tarmac meeting and would leave it up to career investigators to make recommendations on whether to indict.
Clinton’s use of private email servers as the secretary of state in the administration of President Barrack Obama has been used as a means to topple her in the run-up to the 2016 presidential vote. The FBI has been investigating whether sensitive information was mishandled.
As a consolation, Lynch said she plans to accept the recommendation of fellow agents as well as other prosecutors on the issue of indicting Mrs. Clinton.
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She said she set up the email address for reasons of convenience, because it was easier to do everything from her Blackberry than to have several phones or tablets. She later added “hindsight is 20/20”, acknowledging that the meeting between her husband the Lynch was viewed negatively.
“They said hello, they talked about grandkids”, Clinton said, calling the chat “purely social”.
The emails were routed through a server located in the basement of Clinton’s NY home during her tenure as the nation’s top diplomat.
Clinton has repeatedly said that none of the emails were marked classified at the time they were sent or received. Clinton had come under fire when it was revealed that she used a personal email server kept in her Chappaqua, New York, home while she was the secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. “What Bill did was stupid!”
The central question in the Justice Department effort is whether the actions met the legal standard for the crime of mishandling classified information.
“The truth here is be going to be how candid was she in the interview- how many questions did she answer freely, and in a forthcoming manner”, Ron Hosko, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation assistant director, said.
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Her use of private email for official correspondence first came to light in 2015 during Republican-led congressional investigations into her handling of a militant attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.
