Here’s the campaign bumper sticker you won’t see: “Clinton in ‘16 — Because No Charges Were Recommended.” ADVERTISING Here’s the campaign bumper sticker you won’t see: “Clinton in ‘16 — Because No Charges Were Recommended.” FBI Director James Comey announced
Here’s the campaign bumper sticker you won’t see: “Clinton in ‘16 — Because No Charges Were Recommended.”
FBI Director James Comey announced Tuesday that, having completed its investigation, his agency will not recommend to the U.S. Department of Justice that Hillary Clinton face criminal prosecution for mishandling sensitive emails when she was secretary of state. No reasonable prosecutor would take up this case, Comey said.
That decision is an enormous relief to Clinton, and an artful escape. The presumptive Democratic nominee for president no longer has to worry about the presumptive part. It looks like she’ll get the nod at the National Democratic Convention. If the FBI had concluded that Clinton likely broke the law, the bumper sticker of the day would have nixed her name and instead featured Joe Biden’s.
Let’s leave the cheerleading to her campaign staffers, though. This is a political disaster for Clinton. Relying exclusively on a private email server to do the public’s work as America’s top diplomat was foolish and reckless. Comey, in a surprise televised statement, rendered a two-word judgment that may never be forgotten: “extremely careless.” As that behavior applies to classified government information, it’s not what many people are looking for in a president.
Specifically, Comey said: “Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
He continued: “There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”
Parsing that statement, the phrase that sticks out is “any reasonable person,” as in: You’d think the barest qualification for being secretary of state — or becoming president — is the ability to use reasonable judgment. Clinton, the FBI director asserted, failed that test. It’s not going too far to say that what she did could be a firing offense, if she were still on the job. Getting the ax would be the likely fate of any high federal official who showed a willful lack of respect for handling U.S. secrets. But set aside government protocols and politics. Imagine the phrase “extremely careless” stamped on your own performance evaluation by the boss. What might the consequences be?
Damning details of Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email server were confirmed in a May report by the inspector general of the State Department: That report made clear that she violated department policy, imperiled national security and lied about it. The FBI spent a year trying to learn whether she mishandled classified information, intentionally or through gross negligence, to the extent that she committed a felony.
After poring through thousands of emails, Comey said, the FBI found 110 emails in 52 chains that contained classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight chains contained “top secret” information, 36 had “secret” info. The FBI also tracked down emails Clinton’s team did not turn over. They included a few of the secret ones, but Comey said investigators found no evidence any were intentionally deleted.
As for damage to national security, Comey said Clinton sent and received work-related emails while traveling abroad “in the territory of sophisticated adversaries” (Chinese spies? Russians?). The FBI found no evidence of a hack, but then again, Comey noted, sophisticated hackers don’t leave fingerprints. The FBI did catch wind of “hostile actors” who gained access to email accounts of people with whom Clinton communicated.
Contrast those disturbing facts with Clinton’s insistence that any classified material on her server was categorized as such retroactively. As Clinton told NBC News over the weekend: “Let me just repeat what I have repeated for many months now. I never received nor sent any material that was marked classified.”
Without reading the email chains (they’re secret, after all), we don’t know how much of Clinton’s carefully worded denial collapses in the wake of the FBI investigation, but it looks dubious. Comey stated: ” … seven email chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received (our italics). These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending emails about those matters and receiving emails from others about the same matters.”
Justice likely will accept Comey’s recommendation, because Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Friday she would accept what the FBI and career prosecutors decide. It’s a judgment call. We can’t dispute it; the evidence isn’t public.
But this we know: Hillary Clinton chose to keep her official emails under her own control, in violation of State Department rules, propriety and common sense. Would Americans trust her as their president? That judgment comes in November.
