The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation offered an assessment of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state Tuesday. Many of his conclusions contradicted Clinton’s often-repeated assertions and criticized the former secretary of state and her team for their carelessness.
Claim 1: Clinton has claimed that she did not “send or receive any information that was marked classified.”
FBI director James Comey said that Clinton transmitted 110 emails that contained “classified information at the time they were sent or received.” Seven emails also contained Special Access Program level information, the highest classification level.
Comey called the sum of classified emails “very small,” but condemned Clinton and her aides for their extreme negligence.
“Even if information is not marked “classified” in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it,” he said.
Though the FBI did not find “clear evidence” that classified information was sent intentionally, Comey underscored that Clinton and her team were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
Claim 2: Clinton has claimed that foreign hackers did not breach her account.
Comey said it was “possible” that hackers breached Clinton’s private server, considering that some accounts that Clinton emailed with regularly were hacked, that her email domain was “known” and “apparent,” and that she sent emails on her personal account outside of the U.S., including “in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.”
“Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account,” he said.
Claim 3: Clinton has claimed that she turned over all work-related emails to the State Department after her lawyers helped conduct a thorough search.
During the course of their investigation, the FBI found “several thousand work-related e-mails” that Clinton had not turned over. Comey also told reporters that Clinton’s lawyers did not do an exhaustive search, despite the former secretary of state’s reassurances.
“The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us,” Comey said. “It is highly likely their search terms missed some work-related e-mails, and that we later found them.”
Though Comey said that the FBI “found no evidence” that Clinton deleted work-related emails intentionally, he said it was “likely” that some work-related emails “are now gone” since her lawyers “deleted all e-mails they did not return to State.”
