Comey said today that the Federal Bureau of Investigation reached its conclusion without any coordination or review with the Justice Department or any other government agency. “They weren’t looking at it”. FBI Director James Comey concludes his appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, July 7, 2016, to explain his agency’s recommendation to not prosecute. “They were not to be classified”, she said.
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“So you have obstruction of justice, you have intentional misconduct and a vast quantity of information”, Comey said.
But Comey said that while the FBI’s year-long investigation turned up “evidence of great carelessness”, he stood by his decision not to recommend prosecution.
Though Clinton has been cleared of criminal charges which could force her out of the presidential race, Trump will continue to sew it into his narrative about “crooked Hillary”, a name Trump uses to describe what he sees as a dishonest Washington insider who doesn’t abide by the rules.
He said during a press conference on Tuesday that while FBI investigators found no “direct evidence” that Clinton’s email domain was successfully hacked, he assessed that “it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account”. “Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account”.
“I know no reasonable prosecutor would take this case”, Comey said.
Pressed by Chaffetz Thursday on whether Clinton lied, Comey said during a hearing that he had not reviewed Clintons testimony because it had not been referred to him by Congress. Chaffetz assured Comey he would soon get a referral.
Even that might not have been too disturbing for voters seeking to evaluate the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.
But the reporter, Mark Landler of The New York Times, persisted, asking if Obama was concerned by Comey’s conclusion that many top State Department officials – not just Clinton – “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information”.
“In their eyes, you had one job – and one job only – to prosecute Hillary Clinton”, the Committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings, told Comey.
Notice how Clinton continually used the words “marked classified” in an effort to make it seem less like she put sensitive US information at risk.
But Clinton yesterday brushed aside the rebuke from Comey in several other interviews.
Hillary Clinton has responded to the FBI’s scathing assessment that she was “extremely careless” with classified government secrets, by shifting the blame onto her former colleagues at the US State Department.
Republicans are trying other avenues to keep the email controversy that has clouded her presidential campaign for months, alive.
Republicans, including Clinton’s White House rival Donald Trump, have cried foul over the lack of charges, alleging that Clinton’s influence as a prominent politician helped her escape criminal proceedings.
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Florida Sen. Marco Rubio sent out a similar solicitation for his re-election bid, arguing that the email saga proved Clinton was unfit to serve as President.
