From the start, Chaffetz said he was “mystified” by Comey’s recommendation to not charge Hillary Clinton with a crime for her mishandling of classified information as Secretary of State.
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Committee chairman, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told Comey that the FBI’s decision on Clinton showed a “double standard” for powerful people.
The FBI has done its investigation and found that Hillary Clinton was extremely negligent in her conduct with our country’s security. Attorney General Loretta Lynch previously said she will follow the FBI’s and career prosecutors’ advice.
And in this case, he repeated, Clinton’s actions did not rise to a prosecutable level.
Gowdy: Secretary Clinton said, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email, there is no classified material”.
With the training we receive and certainly a secretary of state would receive or someone who lives the White House, it goes a little above and beyond just the common sense individual out there trying to determine knowing that classified information will be brought and to remove to an unauthorized site ought to cause pause there, shouldn’t it?
“That’s not what I said”, Comey said. “The material they sent to me they did not believe was classified”.
Comey said that while the investigation did not “find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues meant to violate laws governing the handling of the classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information”.
A Clinton spokesman on Thursday criticized the hearing for its “partisan motivations”, and expressed confidence that Comey’s testimony had shut down any lingering “conspiracy theories” on the matter. Former baseball pitcher Roger Clemens was indicted in 2010 on charges that he lied to Congress, though he was later acquitted, and the Justice Department investigated and later cleared former IRS official Lois Lerner following a referral from lawmakers.
Ryan also says that House Republicans had a productive meeting with their candidate, Donald Trump Thursday morning.
During the Congressional hearing, Mr Comey acknowledged for the first time that there were only three classified emails, and that in each case the emails contained only “partial” markings – meaning, he acknowledged, that they were improperly marked and that as a result, the materials could have been reasonably judged as not classified.
“So let’s get this straight: This is going to be an investigation of the decision that is an investigation of the emails that was part of the investigation of Benghazi”, she told reporters.
GOWDY: OK. Well, I’m looking for a little shorter answer so you and I are not here quite as long.
Democratic US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks to the General Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church during their annual convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania July 8, 2016.
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Rep. Will Hurd, a Republican from Texas who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, made one of the most impassioned pleas for Clinton to face some outcome for her actions.
