WASHINGTON — The FBI director, James B. Comey, said Tuesday that the bureau would not recommend criminal charges in Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information, lifting an enormous legal cloud from her presidential campaign, hours before her first joint campaign appearance with President Barack Obama.
But Comey rebuked Clinton as being “extremely careless” in using a personal email address and server for sensitive information, declaring that an ordinary government official could have faced administrative sanction for such conduct.
To warrant a criminal charge, Comey said, there had to be evidence that Clinton intentionally sent or received classified information — something that the FBI did not find.
“Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” he said at a news conference.
The Justice Department is highly likely to accept the FBI’s instruction. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Friday that she would accept the recommendation of the FBI and career prosecutors in the case, after questions were raised about an impromptu meeting between her and former President Bill Clinton at an airport in Phoenix.
Comey’s statement came three days after FBI investigators interviewed Hillary Clinton, a sign that the case was winding down. He described an elaborate yearlong investigation, in which the FBI examined multiple servers, read 30,000 emails, and interviewed dozens of people.
During the course of the investigation, Comey said, the FBI recovered additional work-related emails that Clinton’s lawyers had not turned over to the State Department, including some that contained classified information. But he said there was no evidence that she or her lawyers had intentionally deleted or withheld them.
Still, Comey delivered what amounted to an extraordinary public tongue-lashing.
“There is evidence to support a conclusion that Secretary Clinton should have known an unclassified system was no place for that information,” he said.
The statement by Comey concluded an investigation that began a year ago when the
inspector general for the intelligence agencies told the Justice Department that he had found classified information among a small sampling of emails Clinton had sent and received.
The inspector general, I. Charles McCullough III, said that the emails contained information that was classified at the time they were sent but were not marked classified, and that the information should never have been sent on an unclassified system.
The discovery of Clinton’s email practices grew out of a request by the House Select Committee on Benghazi for communications between Clinton and other officials surrounding the September 2012 attack on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.
As lawyers for the State Department gathered materials, they discovered that Clinton had used a personal, nongovernment address for her email and routed the messages through a server, kept in her home in Chappaqua, New York.
After a negotiation between the State Department and Clinton’s lawyers, she agreed to turn over 55,000 pages of email from her time as secretary of state. She withheld email — roughly half the total number of messages — that she said touched on personal issues, from yoga classes to the flower arrangements for her daughter’s wedding.
The State Department turned over to the House committee roughly 800 emails pertaining to Benghazi. Clinton asked the department to release the remaining trove of emails, which set off a complicated, politically charged process of vetting each one to determine whether it contained classified information.
The CIA, the State Department and other agencies reviewed the emails, designating hundreds of them with varying levels of classification.
Clinton has asserted that she did not send or receive any information marked classified at the time it was sent. But about two dozen emails were designated “top secret,” the highest level of classification, and Clinton’s critics say she jeopardized national security.
Several of those pertained to the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan, which is a covert program, though it is widely reported in the Pakistani and U.S. media.
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