FBI Director James Comey announced Tuesday that he will not recommend criminal charges against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in relation to her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of State.
“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is information that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” He added, “None of these emails should have been on any kind of unclassified system.” The FBI chief added that “there was no intentional misconduct.”
“We found no evidence that any of the additional work-related emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them in some way,” he further explained. “Secretary Clinton used several different servers... and several mobile devices.” For this reason, Comey called the investigation “painstaking.” He added that 110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined to have had classified information at the time they were sent. Eight of those chains contained information that was top secret at the time they were sent. Clinton was interviewed for more than three hours Saturday by the agency after more than a year of an investigation.
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Ultimately, Comey concluded: “No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon issued a statement on Tuesday saying that the Democratic candidate is "pleased that the career officials handling this case have determined that no further action by the department is appropriate." He added, "As the Secretary has long said, it was a mistake to use her personal email and she would not do it again."
