But it is now what Hillary Clinton is stuck with – deservedly. General David Petraeus was forced to resign as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, convicted of mishandling binders of classified information, and fined $100,000 for allowing his biographer to read parts of the binders.
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Comey said the FBI’s investigation found no “direct evidence” of such intrusion, but concluded that hostile actors did gain access to the private commercial email accounts of people Clinton contacted regularly via her personal account.
“Do you need a referral from Congress to investigate her statements under oath?” The FBI director said that yes, “even a basic free account, a Gmail account, had better security than she did”. “They weren’t looking at it”.
“That’s a question I’m not qualified to answer”, Comey responded. She was charged with using a private server for sending and receiving emails containing classified information when she was the Secretary of State.
“That’s not true”, Comey replied. All in all it was a mixed bag, much as his press conference earlier in the week had been, in which is offered Clinton the political good news of no criminal charges but called her handling of classified information “extremely careless”. “Even there, they prosecuted him for a misdemeanor”, Comey told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “None of these emails should have been on any kind of unclassified system”, Comey said, adding that “any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position. should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation”. Newly released emails show State Department staffers wrestled in December 2010 over a serious technical problem with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s home email server.
But he said it was not clear whether Clinton knew that such a designation denoted classified material, saying “the secretary may not have been as sophisticated as people assume” when it comes to such issues.
But Comey testified that Clinton did not lie to the FBI during their year long probe which culminated with her interview with bureau agents on Saturday and explained that the agency did not want to “put people in jail unless we can prove they knew they were doing something they shouldn’t do”. Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Wednesday accepted Mr Comey’s recommendation that no criminal charges were warranted and closed the case.
Still, Comey is correct in not recommending criminal prosecution because there is no evidence that Clinton intentionally sent or willfully mishandled classified material. Mrs. Clinton told the committee that her attorneys “went through every single e-mail”.
Comey insinuated Clinton was unreasonable but had to fudge the law by basing his conclusion on intent rather than action. And asked whether Clinton had lied to Congress, Fallon replied: “Of course not”. “You’ll have one in the next few others”.
The 800-page report by the GOP-led Benghazi Committee found no wrongdoing by the former secretary of state, but the two-year inquiry had revealed that she used a private email server for government business, triggering a yearlong FBI investigation that continues to shadow the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. The FBI has amassed a huge amount of evidence on Clinton’s reckless conduct – evidence that it has presented to the Justice Department in a detailed “decline-to-prosecute” memorandum.
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Fortunately for Hillary Clinton, it seems her Republican opponent for the presidency will be Donald Trump, which likely means the GOP will get another four to eight years to pursue their white whale. But he was also correct in calling her out for recklessness.
