Hillary
Clinton emails; candidate urges FBI to release 'full and complete
facts immediately'
Ms
Clinton delivers her statement during a news briefing in Des Moines
Feliks Garcia New
York
Hillary Clinton
broke her silence after the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced
its reopening of a probe into her use of email while serving as
Secretary of State – stoking the flames of the ongoing scandal that
has plagued her campaign.
The Democratic
presidential candidate made her statement following a day of
speculation caused by FBI director's letter to congression
Republicans. Mr Comey revealed that investigators discovered emails
pertinent to the prior probe into Ms Clinton's private email servers
– for which the FBI found evidence of no criminal wrongdoing in
July.
The former Secretary
of State said it is "imperative" that investigators release
all informatoon about the new emails, following Mr Comey's Friday
announcement.
"We are 11 days
out from perhaps the most important national election of our
lifetimes. Voting is already underway in our country," she said.
"So, the American people deserve to get the full and complete
facts immediately."
She emphasised that
Mr Comey did not know the significance of the particular emails
referenced in his letter, and expressed her confidence that the
decision to not pursue criminal charges in July would remain
unchanged.
"Therefore,
it's imperative that the Bureau explain this issue in question –
whatever it is – without any delay."
FBI officials found
the emails while investigating electronic devices that belonged to
longtime aide Huma Abedin and her now-estranged husband, former
congressman Anthony Weiner – who is the focus of an investigation
for allegedly sending sexts to a minor.
When questioned
about the investigation into Mr Weiner's case, Ms Clinton repeated
her urge for the FBI to release more information.
"We've heard
these rumours. We don't know what to believe,” she said. "That
is why it is incumbent on the FBI to tell us what they are talking
about. Because right now your guess is as good mine, and I don't
think that is good enough."
In his Friday
statement, Mr Comey said: “In connection with an unrelated case the
FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be
pertinent, and I am writing to inform you that the investigative team
briefed me on this yesterday and I agreed the FBI should take
appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to
review these emails to determine whether they contain classified
information, as well as to assess their importance to our
investigation.”
He added: "The
FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be
significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to
complete this additional work."
Republican nominee
Donald Trump quickly seized the opportunity to use this persistent
scandal to his advantage.
While speaking at a
campaign event in New Hampshire, Mr Trump said the news is "bigger
than Watergate" – the scandal that led to President Richard
Nixon's 1974 resignation.
"Hillary
Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before,” Mr
Trump said. “We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the
Oval Office.
“I have great
respect for the fact that the FBI and the DOJ are now willing to have
the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made."
He continued: "This
was a grave miscarriage of justice that the American people fully
understand. It is everybody’s hope that it is about to be
corrected."
In July, Mr Comey
said he would not seek prosecution against Ms Clinton after reading
through more than 30,000 emails.
"Although there
is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the
handling of classified information, our judgment is that no
reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case," he said. "In
looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of
classified information, we cannot find a case that would support
bringing criminal charges on these facts."
Only
11 days out from the election, the FBI’s director said newly
discovered emails – from an investigation into Anthony Weiner –
were under review. Will it matter to voters?
Dan Roberts in
Washington
Friday 28 October
2016 22.09 BST
Eighteen months and
30 miles away from where Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign
began, the issue that has dogged the Democratic candidate from the
start caught up with her on Friday, when director James Comey
announced the FBI was reviewing newly discovered emails relating to
her personal server.
We know from leaked
emails that even Clinton’s closest friends thought it was “insane”
to secretly communicate via a private computer server while working
as secretary of state.
“Do we actually
know who told Hillary she could use a private email?” wrote close
aide and transition team member Neera Tanden in a July 2015 note
recently revealed by WikiLeaks. “And has that person been drawn and
quartered? Like [this] whole thing is fucking insane.”
Fortunately for
Clinton, in July the FBI eventually decided to let this potentially
illegal evasion of security protocol pass with a sharp wrap on the
knuckles.
There was an audible
intake of breath among campaign followers in the summer, when Comey
criticised her for being “extremely careless” in her handling of
classified information, but his decision not to recommend criminal
charges brought to an end the one threat deemed capable of preventing
her from becoming president.
That was, at least,
until Comey dropped a fresh bombshell. The three-paragraph letter he
released to Congress on Friday revealing the existence of potentially
significant new evidence may or not have any legal bearing on whether
charges are again possible. It certainly had a political impact.
Clinton was in the
air when the letter leaked. An onboard Wi-Fi outage meant she may not
have discovered its existence at all until her plane landed in Cedar
Rapids, Iowa, for a campaign stop just down the road from her very
first event as a candidate on 14 April 2015.
There was a long
delay in her leaving the plane as aides urgently gathered onboard to
discuss the issue. A planned photoshoot with Annie Leibowitz had to
be cut short. Her opponent wasted no time pointing out that it is
never a good look for a presidential candidate to be under criminal
investigation by the FBI.
“Hillary Clinton’s
corruption is on a scale we have never seen before,” was Donald
Trump’s predictable hyperbole at a rally minutes later in New
Hampshire. “We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the
Oval Office.”
Democrats rushed to
downplay its significance on Friday, as Clinton’s campaign
chairman, John Podesta, suggested Comey may have been “browbeaten”
by aggressive Republicans into announcing a relatively minor wrinkle
for the sake of transparency.
The investigation
had still not officially been closed, so it is also oversimplifying
to say, as many initially did, that it has been “reopened”. The
fact that the evidence in question reportedly comes from a separate
investigation into a sex scandal engulfing Anthony Weiner, the
estranged of husband of Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s key aides,
should make it less relevant to her security case, not more.
But there is little
doubt it gives everyone something to talk about in the 11 days left
before election day. Unless the FBI moves far faster than is normal
to clarify that there is nothing new of significance here, Democrats
may also struggle to come up with convincing answers to questions
that will undoubtedly weigh on the minds of some voters.
HILLARY
CLINTON'S EMAILS: THE REAL REASON THE FBI IS REVIEWING MORE OF THEM
The
new evidence that has emerged relates to how Huma Abedin, a longtime
Clinton aide, managed her email accounts.
BY KURT EICHENWALD
ON 10/29/16 AT 3:19 AM
The disclosure by
the Federal Bureau of Investigation late on Friday, October 28 that
it had discovered potential new evidence in its inquiry into Hillary
Clinton’s handling of her personal email when she was Secretary of
State has virtually nothing to do with any actions taken by the
Democratic nominee, according to government records and an official
with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke to Newsweek on
condition of anonymity.
The revelation that
the FBI has discovered additional emails convulsed the political
world, and led to widespread (and erroneous) claims and speculation.
Many Republicans proclaimed that the discovery suggests Clinton may
have broken the law, while Democrats condemned FBI Director James
Comey for disclosing this information less than two weeks before the
election, claiming he did it for political purposes.
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Donald Trump, the
Republican nominee, said the development showed his opponent had
engaged in corruption “on a scale we have never seen before,’’
while Clinton called for the FBI to release all of the information it
has, saying the American people have a right to know everything.
The truth is much
less explosive. There is no indication the emails in question were
withheld by Clinton during the investigation, the law enforcement
official told Newsweek, nor does the discovery suggest she did
anything illegal. Also, none of the emails were to or from Clinton,
the official said. Moreover, despite the widespread claims in the
media that this development had prompted the FBI to “reopen” of
the case, it did not; such investigations are never actually closed,
and it is common for law enforcement to discover new information that
needs to be examined.
As of Friday night
Comey had only said the bureau is seeking to determine whether these
newly discovered emails involved classified material.
The FBI found the
new evidence during an unrelated inquiry into former Democratic
Congressman Anthony Weiner regarding an allegation that he sent
illicit, sexual text messages to an underage girl in North Carolina.
In the course of that investigation, agents seized a laptop computer
Weiner shared with his wife, Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide who
has already been questioned by the FBI during its investigation. The
bureau found the emails now being examined on this shared device,
which agents obtained some time ago.
This new evidence
relates to how Abedin managed her emails. She maintained four email
accounts—an unclassified State Department account, another on the
clintonemail.com domain and a third on Yahoo. The fourth was linked
to her husband’s account; she used it to support his activities
when he was running for Congress, investigative records show. Abedin,
who did not know Clinton used a private server for her emails, told
the bureau in an April interview that she used the account on the
clintonemail.com domain only for issues related to the Secretary’s
personal affairs, such as communicating with her friends. For
work-related records, Abedin primarily used the email account
provided to her by the State Department.
Because Clinton
preferred to read documents on paper rather than on a screen, emails
and other files were often printed out and provided to her either at
her office or home, where they were delivered in a diplomatic pouch
by a security agent. Abedin, like many State Department officials,
found the government network technology to be cumbersome, and she had
great trouble printing documents there, investigative records show.
As a result, she sometimes transferred emails from her unclassified
State Department account to either her Yahoo account or her account
on Clinton’s server, and printed the emails from there. It is not
clear whether she ever transferred official emails to the account she
used for her husband’s campaign.
Abedin would use
this procedure for printing documents when she received emails she
believed Clinton needed to see and when the Secretary forwarded
emails to her for printing. Abedin told the FBI she would often print
these emails without reading them. Abedin printed a large number of
emails this way, in part because, investigative records show, other
staff members considered her Clinton’s “gatekeeper” and often
sent Abedin electronic communications they wanted the Secretary to
see.
This procedure for
printing documents, the government official says, appears to be how
the newly discovered emails ended up on the laptop shared by Abedin
and her husband. It is unclear whether any of those documents were
downloaded onto the laptop off of her personal email accounts or were
saved on an external storage device, such as a flash drive, and then
transferred to the shared computer. There is also evidence that the
laptop was used to send emails from Abedin to Clinton; however, none
of those emails are the ones being examined by the FBI. Moreover,
unless she was told by Abedin in every instance, Clinton could not
have known what device her aide was using to transmit electronic
information to her.
If the FBI
determines that any of the documents that ended up on the shared
device were classified, Abedin could be deemed to have mishandled
them. In order to prove that was a criminal offense, however,
investigators would have to establish that Abedin had intended to
disclose the contents of those classified documents, or that she knew
she was mishandling that information.
If the documents
were not classified, no crime was committed. But either way, this
discovery has embarrassed Clinton, even though there is no evidence
at this point suggesting she has been implicated in any potential
wrongdoing.
According to a
letter Comey sent to the chairs of several Congressional committee on
Friday, he learned of these new emails on Thursday, October 27.
His decision to
immediately reveal this discovery was not a partisan act, although it
was a horribly mishandled one. Arguably, he had to issue his letter
because of previous statements he had made to Congress. In September,
he testified that the bureau had completed its review of the evidence
in the case and found no crimes had been committed. With the
discovery of the information on the laptop shared by Weiner and
Abedin, that sworn statement was no longer true, and there was new
evidence that needed to be examined. As a result, Comey felt he was
obligated to inform the committees as quickly as possible that his
previous statement was now incorrect.
However, the letter
he sent could well damage the reputation of the FBI as an apolitical
organization for years to come. Given that Comey also testified that
his agents would examine any new evidence that emerged, Democrats
will undoubtedly argue that issuing a letter repeating that point was
unnecessary.
In a communication
to bureau employees, Comey described his letter to Congress as an
attempt to thread a needle – amend his testimony while not
disclosing details of an ongoing investigation. The combination,
however, created a circumstance where politicians are filling in the
blanks, creating a storyline of corruption that was not justified by
the evidence developed by the bureau. Making it worse, the
communication to the bureau employees is far more detailed than what
Comey issued to Congress.
“There is a
significant risk of being misunderstood,” Comey told the bureau
employees in the communication, explaining why he was so vague in his
letter to Congress. “It would be misleading to the American people
were we not to supplement the record. At the same time, however,
given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered
collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading
impression.”
Unfortunately, by
trying to have things both ways – revealing the change in
circumstances while remaining vague about what the agents know –
Comey has created that misleading impression that could change the
outcome of a presidential election, an act that, if uncorrected, will
undoubtedly go down as one of the darkest moments in the bureau’s
history.
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