Meanwhile, Goodlatte and another Republican congressman, Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, have asked the US attorney for Washington, D.C., to investigate whether Clinton perjured herself. The panel’s Democrats tried to change to subject to issues of community policing and gun control in what seemed a warmup for the fall’s campaign season.
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“Despite recommending that Mrs. Clinton not be prosecuted, FBI Director James Comey announced that the FBI had identified at least 113 emails that passed through Clinton’s server and contained materials that were classified at the time they were sent, including some that were Top Secret”.
The chairman laid out a timeline of events and connections for the attorney general.
“I’ve committed to accepting the recommendations”, Lynch told Representative Trent Franks (R-Arizona). The matter was handled like any other matter.. “What do I say [to them] when, in fact, saying something that isn’t true – and handling classified information in an extremely careless way – has no criminal ramifications?”
House Republicans on Monday formally asked the Justice Department to investigate Hillary Clinton and determine whether she lied to Congress, a fresh challenge certain to shadow the Democratic presidential candidate.
Lynch said the conversation had been entirely social in nature, and that she’d never discussed Clinton’s email practices with either Bill or Hillary Clinton.
Clinton told CNN she emailed with “about 300 people in the government, mostly in the State Department”.
Registered voters who oppose the decision to forgo criminal charges are nonetheless split on whether the outcome makes them less likely to vote Clinton in November – 47 percent say it makes no difference in their vote while 45 percent say they’re less likely to support her (8 percent say they’re more likely to do so).
AG Lynch: Congressman, I refer you to my statement you just commented on, with respect to…
“We’re beating a dead horse here for political reasons”, said California Rep. Zoe Lofgren.
The hearing marked Lynch’s first appearance before Congress since the Justice Department closed without charges the federal investigation into Clinton’s private email server.
“We’re in the middle of an election season”, Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., said of the Republicans’ questions.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch is testifying before Congress amid a roiling national debate over police violence and as House Republicans seek a Justice Department perjury investigation of Hillary Clinton. She testified for 11 hours in a hearing last October on Capitol Hill about the 2012 fatal attacks in Benghazi, Libya, during which she said she’d turned over all her emails, she had not sent or received classified information with markings, she had used only one device and that neither she nor her aides had deleted work-related emails.
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Republicans repeatedly grilled Lynch for meeting privately with former President Bill Clinton several days before she made the decision not to file charges. She instead focuses on the killings of five Dallas police officers by Micah Xavier Johnson, an Army veteran apparently angry over police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota. Lynch said it would be unfair to give a blanket answer.
