Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took to Twitter on Thursday after a watchdog report issued by the Justice Department revealed that former FBI Director James Comey “used a personal email account to conduct FBI business.”
Clinton, who ran for president in 2016 but lost to Donald Trump amid scrutiny of her use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state, responded to the news in a brief tweet.
“But my emails,” she wrote, an apparently tongue-in-cheek response to a reporter’s tweet highlighting Comey’s use of a Gmail account.
The 568-page inspector general report issued Thursday criticized Comey for his handling of the investigation but found no evidence that he was motivated by political bias or preference in his decisions.
Comey told investigators he used his personal email and laptop only when working on unclassified documents set for public dissemination, such as public speeches. He said he spoke with his chief of staff, Jim Rybicki, about the decision.
In an email to officials, Rybicki said that Comey occasionally sent “unclassified emails from his official FBI.gov mail account address to (his Gmail account).”
“He opened this personal account at about the time he became Director,” Rybicki told officials, according to the inspector general’s office. “To ensure a high level of cybersecurity, Director Comey routinely deletes all emails from his [Gmail] account each day, and then clears the deleted messages folder.”
Comey faced criticism during and after the 2016 presidential election for his handling of the Clinton investigation. His decision to release a letter to Congress informing lawmakers of newly uncovered Clinton emails just weeks before the election had a strong impact on the vote, according to analysts.
Comey said two days before the election that nothing new or incriminating was found in the emails.
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