The FBI won’t recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her
use of a private email server while secretary of state, agency Director
James Comey said Tuesday, lifting a major legal threat to her presidential
campaign.
Comey’s decision almost certainly brings the legal part of the issue to a
close and removes the threat of criminal charges. Attorney General Loretta
Lynch said last week that she would accept the recommendations of the FBI
director and of career prosecutors.
“No charges are appropriate in this case,” Comey said in making his
announcement.
But Comey made that statement after he delivered a blistering review of
Clinton’s actions, saying the FBI found that 110 emails were sent or
received on Clinton’s server containing classified information. He said
Clinton and her aides were “extremely careless” and added that it was
possible that people hostile to the U.S. had gained access to her personal
email account.
Yet he added that after looking at similar circumstances, the agency
believed that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
The announcement came three days after the FBI interviewed Clinton for
hours in a final step of its yearlong investigation into the possible
mishandling of classified information.
Though his recommendation apparently ends the legal threat, it’s unlikely
to wipe away many voters’ concerns about Clinton’s trustworthiness. And it
probably won’t stop Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who
has called for criminal charges, from continuing to make the server a
campaign issue.
Clnton’s personal email server, which she relied on exclusively for
government and personal business, has dogged her campaign since The
Associated Press revealed its existence in March 2015.
She has repeatedly said that no email she sent or received was marked
classified, but the Justice Department began investigating last summer
following a referral from the inspectors general for the State Department
and the intelligence community.
The scrutiny was compounded by a critical audit in May from the State
Department’s inspector general, the agency’s internal watchdog, which said
that Clinton and her team ignored clear warnings from department officials
that her email setup violated federal standards and could leave sensitive
material vulnerable to hackers. Clinton declined to talk to the inspector
general, but the audit said that she had feared “the personal being
accessible” if she used a government email account.
The Clinton campaign said agents interviewed her this past Saturday for
three and one-half hours at FBI headquarters. Agents had earlier
interviewed top Clinton aides including her former State Department chief
of staff, Cheryl Mills, and Huma Abedin, a longtime aide who now is the
vice chairwoman of Clinton’s campaign.
Lynch on Friday said that she would accept whatever findings and
recommendations were presented to her. Though she said she had already
settled on that process, her statement came days after an impromptu
meeting with Bill Clinton on her airplane in Phoenix that she acknowledged
had led to questions about the neutrality of the investigation.