Just hours before Hillary Clinton’s first joint campaign appearance with President Obama, FBI director James B. Comey stated that he does not recommend criminal charges against the former Secretary of State.
Despite calling Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for classified emails “extremely careless”, Comey said today that he does not recommend filing criminal charges against the presumptive Democratic nominee. Comey said that an ordinary government official could have faced at least an administrative sanction. He also said there was no evidence that she or her lawyers had intentionally deleted or withheld any emails.
The FBI questioned Clinton on Saturday, only a couple days after it was reported that former president Bill Clinton had held a meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch who is responsible for the government’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Lynch later said she would take the FBI’s lead on whether or not to prosecute Hillary.
Hillary had denied that her husband’s meeting with Lynch had anything to do with the email investigation, but critics are extremely skeptical. Not only has Hillary withheld transcripts from speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, but she even withheld roughly 50,000 pages of emails that she claimed were personal and had nothing to do with work, according to the New York Times.