NATION
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
East Oregonian
Page 7A
FBI: No charges recommended in Clinton email probe
By ERIC TUCKER
and KEN THOMAS
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The
FBI won’t recommend crim-
inal 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.
But Comey called her actions
“extremely careless” and
faulted the agency she led for
a lackadaisical approach to
handling classiied material.
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 appro-
priate in this case,” Comey
said in making his announce-
ment.
But Comey made that
statement after he delivered
a blistering review of Clin-
ton’s actions, saying the FBI
found that 110 emails were
sent or received on Clinton’s
server containing classiied
information. He added it was
possible that people hostile to
the U.S. had gained access to
her personal email account.
“Although we did not ind
clear evidence that Secretary
Clinton or her colleagues
intended to violate laws
governing the handling of
classiied information, there
is evidence that they were
AP Photo/Chuck Burton
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a campaign rally in
Charlotte, N.C., Tuesday with President Barack Obama.
extremely careless in their
handling of very sensitive,
highly classiied informa-
tion,” he said.
Comey contradicted Clin-
ton’s past explanations in the
case that she had turned over
all of her emails and that she
had never sent or received
any emails that were classi-
ied at the time. The FBI chief
said that in the course of the
investigation, 110 emails in
52 email chains were deter-
mined to contain classiied
information at the time they
were sent or received. He also
found that “several thousand
work-related emails” were
not among the group of
30,000 emails Clinton turned
over in 2014.
Yet
after
criticizing
Clinton, her aides and the
department for their actions,
he said that after looking
at similar circumstances
in past inquiries, the FBI
believed that “no reasonable
prosecutor would bring such
a case.”
Comey
made
the
announcement just three days
after the FBI interviewed
Clinton in a inal step of its
yearlong investigation into
the possible mishandling of
classiied information.
He said he shared the
FBI’s indings with no one
else in the government before
making his announcement,
which came just hours
before Clinton traveled with
President Barack Obama on
Air Force One to campaign
together for the irst time this
year.
The declaration from
Comey is unlikely to wipe
away many voters’ concerns
about Clinton’s trustwor-
thiness, especially since the
FBI director so thoroughly
criticized her actions before
delivering his verdict.
“There is evidence to
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support a conclusion that
any reasonable person in
Secretary Clinton’s position
... should have known that an
unclassiied system was no
place” for sensitive conversa-
tions, Comey said.
Nor will the recommen-
dation stop Republican
presidential
candidate
Donald Trump, who has
called for criminal charges,
from continuing to make
the server a campaign issue
or suggesting Clinton was
helped by a Democratic
administration.
After
Comey’s announcement ,
Trump tweeted: “The system
is rigged. ... Very very unfair!
As usual, bad judgment.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan
of Wisconsin, a Republican,
said the decision not to
prosecute Clinton deied
explanation, adding, “No one
should be above the law.”
Clinton
campaign
spokesman Brian Fallon
said it was pleased with the
decision but reiterated that it
was a “mistake” for Clinton
to use personal email.
Clinton’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 classi-
ied, but the Justice Depart-
ment 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 Clinton
and her team ignored clear
warnings from department
oficials that her email setup
violated federal standards and
could leave sensitive mate-
rial vulnerable to hackers.
Clinton declined to talk to
the inspector general, but the
audit said 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 head-
quarters. 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.
The staff member who
set up the server, Bryan
Pagliano, was granted limited
immunity from prosecution
by the Justice Department
last fall in exchange for his
cooperation.
Lynch said Friday that she
would accept whatever ind-
ings 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, which she acknowl-
edged had led to questions
about the neutrality of the
investigation.
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