House Republicans are getting answers from FBI Director James Comey Thursday in a Congressional Hearing on Capitol Hill.
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While embracing the Federal Bureau of Investigation director’s criticism of Clinton for her careless handling of sensitive official information, Republicans have moved on many fronts to challenge his July 5 recommendation against seeking charges.
The Utah Republican then asked if the FBI had investigated whether Clinton perjured herself when addressing the server while testifying to Congress.
You have got to be kidding me! “They weren’t looking at it”.
Clinton was secretary of the state at the time of the attacks.
But Clinton may not have had sufficiently sophisticated understanding to know the emails that passed through her personal server were classified, Comey said. “Was that true?” Gowdy asked.
COMEY: “That’s not true”.
I disagree. It was obviously just that, a partisan attempt to wring another news cycle’s worth of headlines out of a “scandal” whose dying embers were being definitively snuffed out.
“Certainly, she should have known not to send classified information”, he said. “There is simply no precedent for indicting a former secretary of state for carelessness, even extreme carelessness”. Comey said she had multiple devices and that investigators found thousands of work-related emails that had not been turned over.
Under persistent questioning at the hearing of the House Oversight Committee, Comey said Clinton did not break the law. “It would send the wrong signal to all those charged with safeguarding our nation’s secrets”, he said, “if you choose to provide her access to provide her access to this information despite the FBI’s findings”.
Chaffetz said that if a regular person had done what Clinton was suspected of doing, they would have been arrested.
“Which happened … as a result of our former secretary of state’s decisions”, Walberg said. “I am keenly aware that Secretary Clinton is set to begin receiving classified intelligence briefings after the Democratic National Convention”, he wrote.
“We have no basis to conclude that she lied to the FBI”, Comey said.
However, he also said there was no evidence anyone wilfully or intentionally mishandled classified information and that “no reasonable prosecutor” would pursue such a case.
LISA DESJARDINS: Comey argued that what Clinton may well have been worth some kind of punishment, but not prosecution as a crime.
“The system is rigged”, the GOP nominee said on Twitter.
Fallon also said that all of the lawyers who sorted Clinton’s emails did in fact have security clearances, contradicting Comey’s comments.
Clinton’s campaign sent out an email after the Gowdy exchange with links to 2015 stories about the congressman releasing the name of a Central Intelligence Agency source during his Select Committee on Benghazi hearings.
Committee Democrats spent the hearing portraying the whole affair as yet another attempt by Republicans – following the House Select Committee on Benghazi – to use the mechanics of government to wound their presidential nominee.
Separately, the State Department was reopening its internal investigation of possible mishandling of classified information by Clinton and top aides. The department had suspended its probe while it was waiting for the Justice Department to complete its criminal investigation.
Republicans are trying other avenues to keep the email controversy that has clouded her presidential campaign for months, alive.
In requesting Clinton’s security clearance be revoked, Ryan, a former Republican nominee for the vice presidency, drew on his own experiences as a candidate. “It seems to a lot of us that the average Joe – the average American – that if they had done what you laid out in your statement, that they’d be in handcuffs”.
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“At the end the day people can disagree, can agree”.
