GOP to Clinton: Email investigations will go on

FBI Director James Comey strongly defended his decision not to prosecute presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server during a congressional panel hearing on Thursday.

Committee chairman, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told Comey that the FBI’s decision on Clinton showed a “double standard” for powerful people.

In lengthier remarks before lawmakers on Thursday, Comey repeated his belief that Clinton and her staff had been extremely careless, and added that he would also describe her conduct as “real sloppiness” and cast doubt on her ability to understand the classified information system.

Following the hearing, Clinton’s campaign released a statement saying Comey’s testimony “shut thte door on any remaining conspiracy theories once and for all”. Comey said he had not been given a referral to investigate possible perjury before Congress. Republicans have said they intend to make a referral so the FBI can investigate.

When asked if the FBI was investigating the Clinton Foundation for its influence at the State Department, Comey refused to answer.

Early on during Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz’s opening questions, he asked Director Comey if the FBI investigated whether Hillary Clinton lied under oath.

WASHINGTON -Republicans signaled they’re not done with election-year investigations of Hillary Clinton and whether she lied to Congress, even after a House committee signed off Friday on its report into the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Clinton had said publicly she never sent or received any classified information. Historically, presidential nominees have access to classified information after the conventions.

Although the announcement took a huge weight off the presumptive Democratic nominee, Federal Bureau of Investigation chief James Comey nonetheless said Clinton and her staff were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information”.

At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, Mr. Comey walked into a conference room on the first floor of the F.B.I.’s headquarters, where he stood behind a lectern for 15 minutes and laid out in clinical detail how Mrs. Clinton’s use of the account was “extremely careless”.

“In their eyes, you had one job, and one job only: to prosecute Hillary Clinton”, Cummings told Comey. Clinton up, she made them all look like idiots.

South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy asked Comey a series of questions rooted in the former secretary of state’s statements on the issue.

Trump, who polls show faces an uphill battle against Clinton in November, has repeatedly accused Clinton of masking her involvement in illegal activity by deleting more than 30,000 emails she claimed were personal and not related to her job as top USA diplomat.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has said “there are a lot more questions that need to be answered” and, in a letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, requested that Clinton be barred from receiving classified briefings for the rest of the campaign – a move that “certainly constitutes appropriate sanctions”.