No criminal charges for Hillary Clinton over private email server

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Picture: Getty Images

Comey’s decision almost certainly brings the legal part of the issue to a close and removes the threat of criminal charges. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said last week that she would accept the recommendations of the FBI director and of career prosecutors.

“No charges are appropriate in this case,” Comey said in his announcement.

But Comey did deliver a blistering review of Clinton’s actions, saying the FBI found that 110 emails were sent or received on Clinton’s server containing classified information. He said Clinton and her aides were “extremely careless” and added that it was possible that people hostile to the US had gained access to her personal email account.

Yet he added that after looking at similar circumstances, the agency believed that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

The announcement came three days after the FBI interviewed Clinton in a final step of its year-long investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information.

Though his recommendation apparently ends the legal threat, it is unlikely to wipe away many voters’ concerns about Clinton’s trustworthiness and it probably won’t stop Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has called for criminal charges, from continuing to make the email server a campaign issue.

Clnton’s personal email server, which she relied on exclusively for government and personal business, has dogged her campaign since its existence was revealed in March 2015. She has repeatedly said that no email she sent or received was marked classified, but the Justice Department began investigating last summer following a referral from the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence community.

The scrutiny was compounded by a critical audit in May from the State Department’s inspector general, the agency’s internal watchdog, which said that Clinton and her team ignored clear warnings from department officials that her email setup violated federal standards and could leave sensitive material vulnerable to hackers. Clinton declined to talk to the inspector general, but the audit said that she had feared “the personal being accessible” if she used a government email account.

The Clinton campaign said agents interviewed her this past Saturday for three and one-half hours at FBI headquarters. Agents had earlier interviewed top Clinton aides including her former State Department chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, and Huma Abedin, a longtime aide who now is the vice chairwoman of Clinton’s campaign.

Last Friday Lynch said that she would accept whatever findings and recommendations were presented to her. Though she said she had already settled on that process, her statement came days after an impromptu meeting with Bill Clinton on her airplane in Phoenix that she acknowledged had led to questions about the neutrality of the investigation.