As GOP prods, FBI director testifies on Clinton email investigation

He defends Clinton-email decision

FBI Director James Comey concludes his testimony Thursday before a House committee where he stood by his recommendation not to charge Hillary Clinton over her email setup as secretary of state.
FBI Director James Comey concludes his testimony Thursday before a House committee where he stood by his recommendation not to charge Hillary Clinton over her email setup as secretary of state.

WASHINGTON -- Republican lawmakers on Thursday used testimony from FBI Director James Comey to try to build a case that Hillary Clinton repeatedly lied to the public and Congress as she defended her use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state.

Later Thursday, State Department spokesman John Kirby said the department was reopening its internal investigation of possible mishandling of classified information by Clinton and top aides. The internal review was suspended in April to avoid interfering with an FBI inquiry, Kirby said.

Kirby said this week that former officials still can face "administrative sanctions." The most serious is loss of security clearances, which could complicate Clinton's naming of a national security team if she becomes president.

"We will aim to be as expeditious as possible, but we will not put artificial deadlines on the process," Kirby said. "Our goal will be to be as transparent as possible about our results while complying with our various legal obligations."

During the nearly five hours of testimony Thursday in Congress, Comey stood his ground on his recommendation, made as a result of the FBI inquiry, against criminal prosecution for Clinton and her aides.

But he said Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, had been "negligent" in her handling of classified material, and he said that her lawyers probably deleted classified material as they destroyed thousands of her emails.

"As a nonlawyer, as a noninvestigator, it would appear to me you have got a hell of a case," Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., told Comey.

"I'm telling you we don't, and I hope people take the time to understand why," Comey responded.

Comey repeatedly acknowledged that the public statements by the former secretary of state, including some she delivered during a sworn appearance before Congress last year, were contradicted by the facts uncovered during the FBI investigation.

"Secretary Clinton said there was nothing marked classified on her emails, either sent or received," Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said during the testimony by Comey before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. "Was that true?"

"That's not true," Comey said. Asked later about Clinton's assertion during congressional testimony that none of her emails had been marked "classified," Comey said three emails bore small markings indicating that they contained classified information.

Comey said FBI investigators did not examine whether Clinton had lied to Congress about her use of emails because the agency did not get a "referral" from the legislative branch to investigate her statements under oath. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the Republican chairman of the committee, promised that would soon change.

"You'll have one," Chaffetz said. "You'll have one in the next few hours."

While Comey confirmed that Clinton did not lie to bureau investigators, he said he was "not qualified to answer" whether she had lied to the public.

"I really don't want to get in the business of trying to parse and judge her public statements," he said.

Types of negligence

Comey said investigators did not find evidence Clinton intended to do wrong with her email setup, and they determined it would have been inappropriate to charge her under a statute allowing for a prosecution based on "gross negligence."

"You know what would be a double standard?" Comey said. "If she were prosecuted for gross negligence."

Comey said he believed Clinton was "extremely careless, I think she was negligent." But he said that FBI agents, in the late stages of the investigation, focused on a different question: "Is there sufficient evidence of intent?

"It takes mishandling it and criminal intent," Comey said. In this and all cases, he said, "we don't want to put people in jail unless we prove that they knew they were doing something they shouldn't do."

Aided by Democrats on the panel, who accused their Republican colleagues of conducting a partisan, political witch hunt, Comey insisted that Clinton was not given special consideration by the FBI nor held to a more lenient standard than a less prominent person would have been.

"It's just not accurate," said Comey, who has served both Republican and Democratic presidents. "We try very hard to apply the same standard whether you're rich or poor, white or black, old or young, famous or not known at all."

He denied suggestions that he had consulted with members of the White House or the Justice Department or coordinated his conclusions about Clinton with them. He insisted that he had not spoken with anyone before announcing his conclusions earlier this week. In a raised voice, he said that he wanted to make something very clear to anyone watching the hearing: "I did not coordinate that with anyone."

Comey repeatedly suggested that someone who had done what Clinton and her aides did would likely be subject to administrative sanctions.

Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., asserted that those administrative consequences could include "revocation of security clearance."

"Yes," Comey agreed.

"It could include an ineligibility for future employment in national security positions?" DeSantis said.

"It could," the FBI director said.

'We're mystified'

Republicans pressed Comey on how he could conclude no charges should be filed if Comey felt Clinton was careless.

"We're mystified and confused by the fact pattern that you laid out and the conclusions that you reached," Chaffetz told Comey. "It seems that there are two standards, and there's no consequence for these types of activities and dealing in a careless way with classified information. It seems to a lot of us that the average Joe, the average American, that if they had done what you laid out in your statement, that they'd be in handcuffs."

Comey said investigators examined charges in that regard for Clinton and her staff members but found a prosecution would have been virtually unparalleled. Federal authorities had filed one such case in nearly a century, and the circumstances were drastically different.

"No reasonable prosecutor would bring the second case in 100 years based on gross negligence," Comey said.

Experts said the case to which Comey was referring is likely that of James Smith, an FBI agent who was accused in 2003 of having a sexual relationship with an informant who turned out to be a Chinese spy. Smith ultimately pleaded guilty to a charge of making a false statement, not a count under the Espionage Act.

Comey has said previously that investigators looked at other cases involving classified information and could not find one that would support charges in the Clinton matter. He specifically addressed the bureau's investigation of former CIA director and retired Gen. David Petraeus, distinguishing it from the Clinton email inquiry in no uncertain terms. He said Petraeus -- unlike Clinton -- lied to the FBI, and investigators found classified material in his desk.

"Clearly intentional conduct," Comey said of Petraeus. "Knew what he was doing was a violation of the law."

Under questioning from DeSantis, Comey said that an employee of the FBI who was found to be "extremely careless" with top secret information would be exposed to potential termination from the bureau.

"One of my employees would not be prosecuted for this," Comey said under questioning later in the hearing. "They would face consequences for this."

Comey said investigators had found no evidence that Clinton's private server had been hacked, though others with whom she corresponded had. He explicitly batted down claims by the Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar -- who revealed that Hillary Clinton was using a private email address -- that he had gotten into Clinton's account.

"He admitted that was a lie," Comey said.

Comey has been the public face of the Clinton investigation, more so than Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Lynch is to appear Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee.

Late last week, Lynch announced that she would accept the recommendation of career prosecutors and FBI agent, , to assuage questions about the investigation's integrity, concerns that were intensified after Lynch met privately with former President Bill Clinton. Lynch and Clinton have said no pending cases were discussed during the chance encounter.

She did so Wednesday in a brief statement closing the investigation concerning Clinton.

Separately, a group of senators sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry requesting that security clearances be immediately suspended for Clinton and several of her top aides.

The letter was signed by 10 Republican senators, including Arkansas' Tom Cotton.

"There is simply no excuse for Hillary Clinton's decision to set up a home-cooked email system which left sensitive and classified national security information vulnerable to theft and exploitation by America's enemies," they wrote. "Failure to impose any sanctions ... sends the wrong message to the Department's employees."

Information for this article was contributed by Michael D. Shear and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times; by Matt Zapotosky of The Washington Post; and by Bradley Klapper of The Associated Press.

A Section on 07/08/2016

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