FBI Dir.: ‘Evidence’ of Hillary’s ‘Violations of Statutes’ – But, No Charges Warranted

Craig Bannister | July 5, 2016
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UPDATE: The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that Attorney General Loretta Lynch has closed the Clinton case.

So, FBI Director James B. Comey said that, yes, Hillary Clinton carelessly violated federal statutes to use multiple servers to give “hostile actors” access to emails that were Top Secret at the time they were sent or received – but, he concluded that “no reasonable prosecutor” would press charges.

Comey told the American people today that it wasn’t just one private server Clinton used to exchange classified information:

“Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain.”

“From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.”

The FBI director cited “evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

“For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters.”

“There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation. In addition to this highly sensitive information, we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail (that is, excluding the later “up-classified” e-mails).”

“But even if information is not marked “classified” in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it."

What’s more, he said that Clinton exposed the classified information to hacking by America’s enemies:

“We assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.”

His conclusion: she may be guilty of breaking the law, but nothing should be done about it:

“Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

 

 

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