FBI head faces Congress over Clinton email investigation

Attorney General Loretta Lynch formally closed the case Wednesday. Comey recommended Petraeus be charged with a felony, but then-Attorney General Eric Holder downgraded the charge to a misdemeanour.

Representative Jason Chaffetz, the Republican chairman of the House committee, made it clear someone should be punished for Clinton’s email use but struggled to come up with a compelling culprit.

On Tuesday, Comey said 110 classified e-mails passed through Clinton’s servers, which were not kept on a secure government server. The department said in April it had suspended plans for a review at the FBI’s request.

While Comey’s investigation didn’t find any evidence of “hostile actors” hacking into Clinton’s private email server, he couldn’t rule out that possibility. The Department of Justice confirmed on Wednesday they would not be pressing charges against Clinton, per the FBI’s recommendations. “No precedent”, Comey said. He said that she had a server in her basement with some of the most sensitive information this country possesses. Comey said it was not.

When asked if Clinton lied to the public, Comey said it was “not qualified to answer” the question. “However, many people – myself included – struggle to reconcile the case that you made against Secretary Clinton with the decision against recommending prosecution”.

The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has strongly defended the decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton over her private email set-up.

On Tuesday we learned the number of Clinton emails bearing classified markings – three – and that the markings were the letter “c” in parenthesis in front of paragraphs that contained classified details.

The FBI’s announcement created instant backlash from congressional Republicans, who said they felt Comey had laid out a sufficient basis for criminal charges.

Before Thursday’s hearing even began, Republican leaders intensified their efforts to seek administrative sanctions against Clinton.

FBI Director James Comey told US lawmakers on Thursday that FBI employees who mishandled classified material in the way Hillary Clinton did as secretary of state could be subject to dismissal or loss of security clearance.

Palmer referred to the national security concerns over Clinton having a private server.

“In their eyes, you had one job – and one job only – to prosecute Hillary Clinton”, the Committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings, told Comey. But with multiple ongoing civil suits seeking access to those e-mails, it is unlikely to be the last.

U.S. Virgin Islands Rep. Stacey Plaskett called the criticism of Comey “utterly offensive”. “We try very hard to apply the same standard whether you are rich or poor, white or black, old or young, famous or not known at all”, he said. “Something seems squirrelly here.’ So I said I will do something unprecedented because I think this is an unprecedented situation”. “I did not coordinate that with anyone”.

The hearing exposed the desperately partisan nature of the Republican attacks on Clinton.

That may have accomplished Comey’s stated goal of providing unprecedented transparency into the investigation because of the “intense public interest” in the matter and brought a formal end to Clinton’s legal jeopardy.