At a press conference held on Tuesday morning in Washington, D.C., FBI Director James Comey told reporters that his agency will not recommend an criminal indictment against Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server to conduct official, and in many cases classified, correspondence during her tenure as Secretary of State.
Though he noted that the FBI found that Clinton and her staff had been “extremely careless” in the former Secretary’s use of a private email server, Comey said that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring an indictment against Clinton, and that “no charges are appropriate in this case.”
Comey prefaced his remarks by claiming that no other federal agency, including the Department of Justice, knew what he was about to say. Before disclosing the FBI’s recommendations, he detailed the results of the investigation into Clinton’s email server. The agency found, for example, that Clinton sent or received 110 emails in 52 email chains that contained classified information at the time she sent or received them. The agency also found that Clinton used more than one email server.
The FBI’s decision not to recommend an indictment against Clinton represents an enormous victory for her presidential campaign, which has struggled since March of last year to answer questions about her email practices.
