FBI recommends no charges in Hillary Clinton’s email case

The F.B.I. is recommending no charges against Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, for her use of a personal email account as America’s top diplomat.

“No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” agency chief James Comey announced Tuesday, regarding Clinton’s handling of classified information on her private server during her term as Secretary of State.

But he said Clinton and her staff were “extremely careless” in their use of email.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s recommendation to the Justice Department will likely have an enormous impact during the political season in the run up to the November 8 presidential election. Republicans including likely nominee Donald Trump have been accusing Clinton of being irresponsible in her use of the government information. 

The FBI announcement comes three days after Clinton’s spokesperson confirmed that she had a “voluntary” meeting with investigators over her use of a personal email server during her time as secretary of state.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch said on Friday that she would accept whatever recommendation she received from the F.B.I.

The statement by Comey concluded an investigation that began a year ago when the inspector general for the intelligence agencies told the Justice Department that he had found classified information among a small sampling of emails Clinton had sent and received.

The inspector general, Charles McCullough III, said the emails contained information that was classified at the time they were sent but were not marked classified, and the information should never have been sent on an unclassified system.

The discovery of Mrs. Clinton’s email practices resulted from a request by the House Select Committee on Benghazi for communications between Clinton and other officials surrounding the September 2012 attack on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

As State Department lawyers gathered materials, they discovered that Clinton had used a personal, non-government address for her email and routed the messages through a server, kept in her home in Chappaqua, New York.

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. She withheld email – roughly half the total number of messages – that she said touched on personal issues, from yoga classes to the flower arrangements for her daughter’s wedding.

Subsequently, the State Department handed 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 C.I.A., the State Department, and other agencies reviewed the emails, designating hundreds of them with varying levels of classification. About two-dozen emails were designated “top secret,” the highest level of classification, andClinton’s critics say she jeopardized national security.

Several of those pertained to the C.I.A.’s drone program against terror targets in Pakistan, which is a covert mission.

Meanwhile,  Republican rival Donald Trump has been diminishing Clinton’s lead as found out by polls in the last few months

A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey says Clinton is extremely popular among minorities, leading Trump 87 percent to 5 percent among African-Americans and 69 percent to 22 percent among Latinos.

However, Clinton has been losing her double-digit lead in terms of overall support, with a USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, released on Monday, suggesting that she now leads Trump by five percentage points, 45.6 percent to 40.4 percent, nationally.

After the announcement of President Obama and Clinton’s joint events, Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, took to his Twitter account to savage Clinton for being part of Washington’s “rigged” political system.

 “Crooked Hillary Clinton is ‘guilty as hell’ but the system is totally rigged and corrupt!” the New York businessman wrote on Monday.

 “Where are the 33,000 missing e-mails?” he added, referring to Clinton’s claim that she removed all of her personal emails that were unrelated to her job as secretary of state.