The Justice Department’s Inspector General revealed Thursday that former FBI Director James Comey used a personal email to conduct FBI business.
[READ: DOJ inspector general’s report on Hillary Clinton emails investigation]
According to the IG’s report examining the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, Comey used a Gmail account in “numerous instances,” even though the Justice Department issued policy in 2016 preventing that practice.
The IG report, released Thursday, cited five examples.
On November 8, 2016, for example, Comey forwarded to his personal email account from his unclassified FBI account a proposed post-election message he wanted to send to all FBI employees, including something he wanted to say about why he told Congress he had reactivated the Clinton investigation so close to Election Day.
Comey told the IG he did so because “I did not have an unclass[ified] FBI connection at home that worked. And I didn’t bother to fix it, whole other story.” He said if he had to write something longer, he would type it on his personal laptop and send to his chief of staff, and “usually copied my own address.”
“Yeah. And so I would use, for unclassified work, I would use my personal laptop for word processing and then send it to the FBI,” he explained.
Comey told the IG he did not have any concerns that he conducted FBI business on his personal laptop or personal email because “it was incidental.”
Comey did not use his personal email or laptop for classified or sensitive information, he told the IG.
The IG also found that Peter Strzok, a key investigator on both the Clinton email case and the Russia investigation, and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, with whom he was having an extramarital affair, also used personal email accounts.
[Also read: FBI agents Peter Strzok, Lisa Page exchanged texts about how they would ‘stop’ Trump from becoming president]
Strzok told the IG it was because he did so “when it wasn’t possible or there, there were problems with the FBI systems.”
The IG recommended the FBI look into the use of his personal email to see if violated department policies, whereas Page has already left the department.
