FBI Director James B. Comey said in a news conference Tuesday that Hillary Clinton and her staff were “extremely careless” sending and receiving emails when she served as secretary of state, but he stopped short of recommending criminal prosecution of Clinton by the Justice Department.
Comely took Clinton, her aides and staff to task for sending emails – some at the top clearance levels – across servers that were not secured. The comments came some 72 hours after FBI agents interviewed Clinton for more than three hours in Washington this weekend.
>>FBI: No charges recommended in Clinton email investigation
The timing of the decision not to recommend charges be filed will likely be questioned by Clinton’s detractors. It comes less than a week after former president Bill Clinton had an impromptu meeting with U.S. Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch aboard Lynch’s plane at an airport in Phoenix. Lynch said the two spoke only of grandchildren and golf at the meeting, and did not speak of the investigation of Clinton's use of private email servers.
It is still up to Justice Department officials as to whether criminal charges will be brought, but it is not seen as likely following Comey’s comments.
Here’s what Comey said about Clinton’s use of two private servers, classified emails sent and received, and the possibility her servers could have been hacked by “hostile actors.”
Comey said:
- The FBI will not recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton
- Clinton and her aides were 'extremely careless' in email handling of classified information
- "Any reasonable person" ... should have known an unsecured system was "no place for those kind of conversations"
- 110 emails in 52 email chains were determined to include classified information (classified either "secret" or "confidential") at the time they were sent and received. Clinton has said that she "never received nor sent any material that was marked classified."
- 8 email chains contained information marked with the highest security classification
- Investigators reviewed more than 30,000 emails turned over to the agency and "fragments" of others that were deleted
- There was evidence to suggest a "disregard of standing security protocols"
- There was no evidence that Clinton or her staff deleted emails with the intention to hide contents
- The FBI assessed that there was no direct evidence that Clinton's personal email domain was hacked. It is possible, however, that "hostile actors" gained access, adding that there is no way to know if it was
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