Lynch announced the decision in a statement Wednesday, saying Comey and “career prosecutors and agents” unanimously recommended that the investigation be closed without charges.
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U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said on Wednesday she had accepted the FBI’s recommendation that no charges should be brought in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s personal email system.
Mr Comey, in an unusually detailed and public accounting of the investigation on Tuesday, said “no reasonable prosecutor” would pursue a criminal case and said he was advising the justice department against bringing any charges.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz said on Thursday that he would ask the FBI to investigate Hillary Clinton’s sworn testimony before Congress in which she falsely said that she did not send or received classified information via email.
People with long memories will recall Hillary Clinton’s stint on the House Judiciary Committee during its investigation of Richard Nixon in the Watergate affair.
Many Republicans viewed Comey’s statement differently.
If Clinton had simply been as thoughtful as any other reasonable person in her position, she would have used a government email address and a government server for Department of State communications. He said there was no evidence that she or any of her aides knew that anything they were doing was against the law. Comey said he stood by the prosecution of Petraeus. “As the secretary has long said, it was a mistake to use her personal email, and she would not do it again”.
He also contradicted Hillary Clinton’s claims asserting that she had never received or sent classified information over the disputed, private email server.
Chaffetz said, “If you are grossly negligent in the handling of classified information – which clearly, based on the fact pattern the director laid out, she was – why is that different and why did he use that word careless, extremely careless, and what’s the difference?”
Comey also said while there was no “direct evidence” that “hostile actors” invaded her personal email domain, “given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved”, the bureau concluded hackers likely did gain access to the private email accounts of people with whom Clinton was in regular contact.
In an exchange with Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., Comey acknowledged that Clinton’s previous public assertions about her management of classified information did not square with the FBI’s conclusions.
Investigators found “no evidence” that Clinton’s camp intentionally deleted messages in an effort to hide them, Comey said.
But Comey’s assertion is more than hard to swallow and fantastical to believe because that very same day President Barack Obama hit the campaign trail with Clinton.
Republican Sen. Bob Corker has withdrawn his name as a possible running mate for Donald Trump, his spokesman confirms.
Congressman Chaffetz then clarified that he was referring to her testimony before the Select Committee on Benghazi in October 2015.
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On Tuesday we learned the number of Clinton emails bearing classified markings – three – and that the markings were the letter “c” in parenthesis in front of paragraphs that contained classified details.
