FBI Director James Comey said he doubted whether Hillary Clinton was “sophisticated enough” to recognize the classified markings on emails sent to her private server during a congressional hearing Thursday.
“I think it’s possible that she didn’t understand what a ‘C’ meant when she saw it in the body of an email,” Comey said of the “confidential” markings in some of the classified emails that ended up on an unsecured server in Clinton’s basement.
Comey was pressed repeatedly on whether Clinton lied under oath last year before the House Select Committee on Benghazi when she said she neither sent nor received any emails “marked” classified. The FBI director debunked that statement Tuesday when he said his team had discovered several emails that did indeed bear classified markings.
But Comey stopped short of characterizing that contradiction as a lie, arguing he thought Clinton might have been confused about what those markings meant.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said Thursday he planned to submit a criminal referral to the FBI to examine whether Clinton lied under oath about the content of her emails.
