FBI Director James Comey defended the work of his agents Wednesday in a memo to staff, arguing the decision to spare Hillary Clinton and her aides from prosecution for their mistreatment of classified information was not a hard one.
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The media has been pressing Clinton to hold a full press conference to give reporters a chance to ask her about a host of issues. “People who have nothing to hide don’t bleach their emails”. He asked questions about Hillary Clinton’s email use that the rest of the media refuse to.
He also said that he initially considered holding the FBI’s investigative report for release this week, but decided against it because staffers had finished reviewing the documents and redacting them for sensitive information by Friday morning.
“I can’t believe that they would do what is such a patently political move”, he complained.
The report revealed new details about Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of State and the subsequent FBI investigation of her actions.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said “steadiness” is the most important quality needed for a commander in chief, during a presidential forum on Wednesday. In a non-disclosure agreement dated January 22, 2009, Clinton attested to having received a “security indoctrination concerning the nature and protection of classified information”.
The newly published exchange is an innocuous note from former US ambassador to Brazil Tom Shannon, praising then-Secretary of State Clinton on her performance at a 2013 Senate hearing on the Benghazi attacks. A similar request went out to three other former secretaries of state at the same time.
Chaffetz originally asked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, departments of Justice and State and the Director of National Intelligence to give a classified briefing to his committee on the redacted material.
Up until now, the State Department has avoided directly answering the question of whether or not Clinton was personally trained in the handling of classified material.
She didn’t hand over all work related emails for investigations. In spite of this, a statement on Clinton’s campaign website excuses Clinton’s email practices, saying, “No information in Clinton’s emails was marked classified at the time she sent or received them”. It was also transferred to a thumb drive that was provided to another of Clinton’s lawyers. He said that while no “reasonable” prosecutor would charge Clinton, her email practices were “extremely careless”.
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Most remarkably, the process of transferring the emails to the laptop involved a Clinton staffer moving all of the emails to a personal Gmail account. In fact, Clinton spent six of those years on the Armed Services Committee, which routinely accesses highly classified material as part of the legislative branch’s duty to oversee the operations of the executive branch.
