FBI Recommends "No Charges" Against Hillary Clinton

ZeroHedge.com

In a surprising statement which concluded moments ago, FBI directos James Comey announced that Federal officials have decided not to pursue federal charges against Hillary Clinton for her private email setup, an announcement that will send a shockwave throughout national politics.

In a press briefing at the bureau’s headquarters in downtown Washington, Comey said investigators and prosecutors had concluded there was not sufficient evidence to push forward with an indictment against Clinton, clearing her of a federal investigation that has loomed over her presidential campaign for nearly a year. Comey’s announcement comes just three days after the former secretary of State sat for a 3.5-hour interview with the FBI on Saturday, and just a few hours before President Obama is set to campaign with Clinton in Charlotte, N.C.

What is shocking is that Comey admitted that Clinton used not one but several different email servers, adding that 110 emails contained classified information and 8 contained top secret information, he also reported that Clinton did not turn over “several thousand” emails to the FBI and added that due to Hillary’s sloppy set up, it is possible that “hostile actors” got access to Clinton’s emails.

Yet, despite all these facts, the FBI has decided not to proceed with recommending charges.

Odd.

As the Hill adds, the juxtaposition is likely to inflame White House critics, who have insisted that political pressures would prevent any chance of an indictment for Clinton, regardless of the damage to national security.  Obama has previously weighed in to dismiss concerns about the investigation — to the ire of Republicans and federal investigators.

Last week, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that she would defer judgment to the FBI and career Justice Department prosecutors, following a private and extremely controversial 30-minute meeting with former President Bill Clinton. The decision left Comey as the public face of the investigation, in what some viewed as an opportunity for the hard-nosed maverick to buck political pressures and act against Clinton. 

“It is impossible for the FBI not to recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton,” her presumptive general election opponent, Donald Trump, said on Twitter this weekend. “What she did was wrong! What Bill did was stupid!”

The FBI began its probe connected to Clinton last summer, when inspectors general at the State Department and federal intelligence agencies referred Clinton’s “homebrew” email arrangement to the Justice Department for review. The bespoke setup might have jeopardized sensitive national secrets, investigators warned.

Roughly one-in-15 of the work-related messages that Clinton sent or received on the private server have been classified at some level, according to the trove of 30,000 emails that she handed over to the State Department. Twenty-two emails were classified as top secret — the highest level of secrecy.

In May, the State Department’s inspector general released a scathing report claiming that Clinton had never asked to use the unconventional setup while in office, and that the request would have been denied if she had.

Comey has been under the gun to finalize the investigation before the presidential nominating conventions later this month. 

While the FBI director has insisted that he had no deadline to complete the probe, a delay past the end of the month would have been interpreted as a sign of trouble for her campaign. 

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-05/fbi-recommends-no-charges-against-hillary-clinton

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