Hillary Clinton has got both a rapping and a reprieve. FBI Director James Comey slammed the former Secretary of State Tuesday for having been "extremely careless" in involving herself with classified information in her private email server. However, he suggested that she should not face criminal charges.
"Although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case," Comey said in a televised statement from FBI headquarters. "Although there is evidence of potential violation of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case."
The announcement was made after Clinton was grilled by the FBI at its headquarters on Saturday for three-and-a-half hours. It was hopefully the end of a yearlong probe that has dogged her presidential campaign and shot up her disapproval ratings.
It was delivered hours before she held her first joint rally with President Obama. It hit the headlines all over the capital.
The statement, of course, did not silence the political outcry around her decision to go in for a private email server for official work at the State Department.
"Mr. Comey's 15-minute announcement, delivered with no advance warning only three days after investigators interviewed Mrs. Clinton in the case, riveted official Washington on an otherwise sleepy summer morning. In offices across the capital, all eyes turned to television screens to hear the outcome of a yearlong investigation that could have transformed the 2016 presidential election and changed history," according to the nytimes.
On Twitter, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, trumped the news.
"The system is rigged," he exclaimed. "Very very unfair! As usual, bad judgment."
He tweeted at 9:09 PM, 5 Jul 2016: "FBI director said Crooked Hillary compromised our national security. No charges. Wow! #RiggedSystem." This got 32,779 32,779 retweets and 56,609 56,609 likes.
However, even though he did not slap charges against her, the renowned FBI chief gave an unflattering picture of her controversial use of a private email server for government work. Earlier, past secretaries of state used private, commercially available email, but none of them had started a private server.
"Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of the classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," he said.
He denounced her for sending and receiving emails related to matters "classified at the top-secret special access program level at the time of the communications."
"There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton's position or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about the matters should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation," Comey said.
Comey also said "it is possible that hostile actors gained access" to Clinton's private email account, noting that her use of that system was widely known and that she sent and received work emails "in the territory of sophisticated adversaries."
The FBI chief pointed to earlier cases who were prosecuted, involving a number of "mishandling of national secrets, or disloyalty to the U.S., or obstruction of justice." However, Clinton's case was different, and such things have not been seen, he said.
The Clinton campaign team seemed to be happy.
"As the Secretary has long said, it was a mistake to use her personal email and she would not do it again," the campaign said in a prepared statement. "We are glad that this matter is now resolved."
