“This is an extraordinarily rare step that was sought exclusively by Republicans for the purposes of further second-guessing the career professionals at the FBI”, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said.
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“What we’ve seen is this lengthy multimillion-dollar congressional investigation that has been highly partisan where they wanted to leak out this or that to try to make their case against Hillary Clinton”, Kaine said.
The FBI on Tuesday provided Republican congressional leaders a package of documents summarizing its now-closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email servers while secretary of State.
Since there is concern over the handling of information and the suspected potential it holds to derail Hillary Clinton’s current lead over Republican candidate Donald Trump, Clinton’s campaign is urging a measure that starkly contrasts with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and their stance on protecting information. “There are no further details at this time”, a spokeswoman for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said in an email.
“Mr. Comey said last month there were three emails that did contain the “(C)” marking indicating the information was classified at the time it was sent or received. So, it may not matter that Kaine is supporting a public release that may never happen, but he’s still providing a unified front with his running mate.
The thousands of messages will be released to Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that has filed numerous legal complaints over the former secretary of state’s email setup while in office, the department added. The Washington Post editorial board said the most troubling part from the latest batch of newly released emails was the exchange between the head of the Clinton Global Initiative in 2009 requesting that Clinton’s top aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, orchestrate a meeting between a top Clinton donor and a senior State Department official.
The two developments on Tuesday all but ensured that the controversy over what FBI Director James Comey called the “extremely careless” handling of classified information by Clinton and her aides while she was secretary of state will persist through the 12 weeks remaining before the election.
In early July, Comey said that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring such a case despite “evidence of of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information”.
However, the Clinton campaign soon expressed concerns that Republicans would cherry-pick the material to discredit Clinton, who is still scrambling to erase a trust deficit among voters.
The notes were released at the same time the State Department announced it would release previously undisclosed emails that the FBI uncovered in their investigation.
“The FBI already determined unanimously that there is insufficient evidence of criminal wrongdoing, ” said Maryland Representative Elijah Cummings, Oversight’s top Democrat. “My understanding is that we have not received them”.
At one point how Clinton stated that she had only one server and that she turned over all of her emails to the State Department, but those comments were then contradicted by Comey’s testimony.
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The announcement follows a separate Judicial Watch filing which revealed that an “entire disc” of information had not been included in the original batch of materials handed over by Secretary Clinton in December 2014.
