Posted on 07/05/2016 11:03:20 AM PDT by walford
FBI Director James Comey shed new light on Hillary Clintons private email setup when he announced Tuesday that the FBI would not recommend charges against the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Here are some of the new details revealed by Comey.
113 emails were classified at the time they were sent
Both Clintons presidential campaign and the State Department have repeatedly insisted that none of the approximately 2,000 emails now considered classified was deemed sensitive at the time.
But Comey on Tuesday said that wasnt quite the case.
In fact, federal agencies have claimed that 113 emails in more than 50 chains contained sensitive information at the time they were sent or received by her private setup, which she kept at her home in New York. Of those, eight chains contained information considered top secret, the highest level of classification.
Three of the sensitive emails were discovered among the thousands the former secretary of State claimed were purely personal in nature and which she deleted before giving her servers to the FBI last year.
An undisclosed very small number of messages bore markings indicating the presence of classified information, he said, without divulging additional details.
Thousands of work emails were deleted
Clinton has previously framed the decision to delete half of her machines cache of approximately 60,000 messages as an effort to avoid letting her private life become public.
I chose not to keep my private personal emails emails about planning Chelsea's wedding or my mother's funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes, she said in March 2015 in a widely scrutinized press conference at the United Nations.
But FBI investigators uncovered several thousand work-related emails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to the State Department, Comey said on Tuesday.
The bureau found traces of those emails on machines connected to the private clintonemail.com domain, as well as fragments from decommissioned servers and from the email accounts of people who had communicated with her.
No official emails were intentionally deleted
None of the work-related messages was intentionally deleted from Clintons machine as part of an effort to evade federal laws, Comey said on Tuesday.
We found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them, he said. Our assessment is that, like many e-mail users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted e-mails or e-mails were purged from the system when devices were changed.
Both government systems and commercial services such as Yahoo or Gmail routinely archive old emails. But Clintons bespoke setup did not include that feature, Comey said.
While deciding which emails to preserve and which to delete, Clintons lawyers also used a search tool and did not go through the emails one by one, as officials from the FBI did as part of their investigation. In doing so, they may have accidentally overlooked some emails that should have been sent to the government.
So it is not surprising that we discovered emails that were not on Secretary Clintons system in 2014, when she produced the 30,000 emails to the State Department, Comey said.
There were likely more work-related emails that will never be recovered
The FBI could not recover all of the emails that Clinton deleted, so theres a good chance that other official messages will be lost forever.
It is also likely that there are other work-related emails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, Comey said.
Those messages, he added, are likely now gone because they deleted all e-mails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.
Clinton used more than one server and multiple mobile devices
The public narrative about Clintons setup is that she used a single server throughout her tenure at the State Department, which was given to the FBI as part of its investigation last year.
But the reality is somewhat more complicated. In fact, Clinton changed machines when older ones became out of date, leaving a trail of out-of-order servers behind her.
Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain, Comey revealed on Tuesday. As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored and decommissioned in various ways.
Old servers, such as one that was decommissioned in 2013, contained email fragments in the unused slack space that investigators combed to try to resurrect some of the old messages.
It's possible she was hacked
FBI officials did not uncover any evidence that Clintons private setup may have been hacked by foreigners, terrorists, activists or anyone else.
But that doesnt mean it didnt happen, according to the head of the FBI.
Hackers have targeted people she communicated with, such as longtime confidant Sidney Blumenthal, and her arrangement was relatively well-known and readily apparent, Comey said.
It is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clintons personal email account, he said.
Anyone else might have faced administrative punishments
Clinton was let off the hook in the eyes of the law, but the FBI doesnt want to send a message that her behavior was OK.
There was evidence of potential violations of laws against handling classified information, Comey said.
Just not enough to bring charges.
Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case, he told reporters.
To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences, Comey added. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions.
But that is not what we are deciding now.
ping.
There's two ways for the Grand Jury to get a case to trial: the first is the Indictment, where the prosecution brings information [charges, called a bill] to the Grand Jury's attention; the second is the Presentment, where the Grand Jury itself crafts the charges of its own knowledge/initiative. (See here.)
Aside from this, there's also the possibility of private prosecution. This, I think, would be an excellent case to try in States where it's allowed.
Think back to Ford’s pardon of Nixon.
If one knows the password the server ain’t been hacked!
Of course we can all speculate and guess the truth, but it has always been apparent to me that it was a premeditated move to circumvent Freedom of Information Act statutes, to prevent "smoking gun" type proof that from the start she intended to use the position as a means for personal gain (aka bribes and TREASON).
She does not think as others think. What goes on in her head is only superficially rational; self-serving, indeed, but why always the deceptive, anti-traditional values, approach even to the self-serving?
Let’s just defeat her in the election. The likelihood of seating an impartial jury, to try her, considering the strong feelings she has created in virtually every sentient American, would be almost a Quixotic venture.
Ah, but I don't want to merely win an election, I want to bring the Sword of Justice down on our government and cut away the cancer that is corruption — the normal we've got to elect X because they aren't Y
obviously isn't working, and besides that you should keep in mind that we handed Congress, both houses of the most powerful branch of government, to the GOP and were resoundingly and repeatedly stabbed in the back.
AHA!
Depends on what happens with the "leaks". In the Court of Public Opinion, perception is everything.
Shout it from the rooftops!
Is that why they call you "Triple"?
maybe...
;-)
maybe...
;-)
“ah, but I don’t want to merely win an election, I want to bring the Sword of Justice down on our government and cut away the cancer that is corruption the normal we’ve got to elect X because they aren’t Y obviously isn’t working, and besides that you should keep in mind that we handed Congress, both houses of the most powerful branch of government, to the GOP and were resoundingly and repeatedly stabbed in the back. “ - EF
-well said!
Why shout? If our votes really mattered, they wouldn’t let us do it. It’s an illusion.
Thank you.
Which begs the question, does the account number for a numbered Swiss Bank account qualify as a secure pass word, or does Hillary demand that the bank account balance be used as the password.
After all, you need to use and 8 figure password and 8 figures is a minimum payoff which suits Hillary well.
Or perhaps she uses the Swiss account number as the user name and the account balance the password.
Because they gotta keep the payoffs in the 8 figure range
Being political animals, maybe no prosecutor in the nation would indict, but I’d bet that every grand jury would.
Riiiight. Why are you here....again?
Its an illusion.
It's a not-all-that-complicated process. The RATs control all the cities and their elections, they cheat and cheat and cheat. Bringing it to a banana republic level of corruption.
Tell me again how Iran, China, and Russian leaders all won their elections.
Well...because they were in Iran, China and Russia.
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