The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) would not recommend criminal charges in Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information, FBI Director, Mr James Comey, said.
Comey said on Tuesday during a news conference in Washington D.C. that an ordinary government official could have faced administrative sanction for such conduct.
To warrant a criminal charge, he said, there had to be evidence that Clinton intentionally sent or received classified information, something that the FBI did not find.
“Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor will bring such a case,” he said.
Comey’s statement is coming three days after FBI investigators interviewed Clinton.
He described as elaborate yearlong investigation, in which the bureau examined multiple servers, read 30,000 emails and interviewed dozens of people.
During the investigation, Comey said, the FBI recovered additional work-related emails that Clinton’s lawyers had not turned over to the State Department, including some that contained classified information.
But he said there was no evidence that she or her lawyers had intentionally deleted or withheld them.
“There is evidence to support a conclusion that Mrs Clinton should have known an unclassified system was no place for that information,’’ he said.
Investigations began in 2015, when the inspector general for the intelligence agencies told the Justice Department he had found classified information among a small sampling of emails Clinton had sent and received.
The Inspector General, Mr Charles McCullough III, said that the emails contained information that was classified at the time they were sent but were not marked classified.
He said the information should never have been sent on an unclassified system.
The discovery of Clinton’s email practices grew out of a request by the House Select Committee on Benghazi for communications between her and other officials surrounding the September 2012 attack on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya.
Four Americans were killed, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
After a negotiation between the State Department and Clinton’s lawyers, she agreed to turn over 55,000 pages of email from her time as secretary of state.
The State Department turned over to the House Committee roughly 800 emails pertaining to Benghazi.
Clinton asked the department to release the remaining trove of emails, which set off a complicated, politically charged process of vetting each one to determine whether it contained classified information.
The CIA State Department and other agencies reviewed the emails, designating hundreds of them with varying levels of classification.
Clinton insisted that she did not send or receive any information marked classified at the time it was sent. (NAN)