The FBI dumped the latest Hillary Clinton email scandal information for the public on Friday before a holiday weekend, the day when the details most likely would be overlooked, and while it turned over no major new revelations, the documents “paint her and her staff as either unaware of or unconcerned with State Department policies on email use,” according to the Washington Post.
The 58 pages of notes about her interview with the FBI about her email scandal reveal the FBI wasn’t even able to track down all of her devices, such as phones, that it had wanted to review, and “that made it impossible for agents to definitively answer every question they had, including whether Clinton’s emails here hacked,” the report said.
The chief of the FBI, James Comey, two months ago said his agency wouldn’t recommend criminal charges against her – even though he publicly described her handling of security issues and email as “extremely careless.”
The new release came as the pressure is rising for something to be done to address the lack of concern in handling of classified and other secret documents that went through Clinton’s private, unsecured, email system while she was in office.
On Friday, the author of the report on her emails said, “The FBI’s investigation and forensic analysis did not find evidence confirming that Clinton’s email accounts or mobile devices were compromised by cyber means. However, investigative limitations, including the FBI’s inability to obtain all mobile devices and various computer components associated with Clinton’s personal email systems, prevented the FBI from conclusively determining whether the classified information transmitted and stored on Clinton’s personal server systems was compromised via cyber intrusion or other means.”
The release of the FBI’s report, according to CNN, ” is likely to give a new burst of political life to the controversy over Clinton’s private server.”
“The episode plays directly into Republican claims that Clinton is dishonest, abhors transparency and lacks the ethical standards required of someone who sits in the Oval Office. It also allows Trump’s campaign to suggest to voters that they will be setting up a repeat of the cycle of scandals, controversy, and investigations that dragged on through the entire presidency of Bill Clinton and which tainted Hillary Clinton at the same time,” CNN said.
“Clinton’s reckless conduct and dishonest attempts to avoid accountability show she cannot be trusted with the presidency and its chief obligation as commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces,” Donald Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said in a statement following the report’s release.
The report showed Clinton repeatedly said she didn’t remember, or couldn’t recall key details and events.
For example, she “could not recall any briefing or training by State related to the retention of federal records or handling classified information,” the report said.
The damaging revelations come as her lead over GOP candidate Donald Trump has been cut in half over recent weeks.
CNN said much of the report repeated Comey’s earlier comments, “including that more than six dozen email chains contained classified information at the time they were sent and that there appeared to have been hacking attempts on her server, though there is no evidence they were successful.”
The FBI said in a statement that the release was to pursue transparency, and respond to numerous Freedom of Information Act requests that were pending.
The redactions that were made were for “classified information or other material exempt from disclosure.”
They do reveal that Clinton’s mobile phones “frequently” would be lost.
Old phones, rather than being preserved, were destroyed by “breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer,” the FBI said.
Comey confirmed in July that Clinton sent and got emails that were marked classified on her unsecure system, even though federal law doesn’t allow the unauthorized “transfer, storage, or destruction of classified information.”
Warned Breitbart, “Presumably, if Clinton’s old smartphones were lost, the information in her emails would be accessible to whoever had found them or obtained them by other means.”
The report said Clinton used 11 smartphones while secretary of State, and two after. Investigators wanted all 13 but two had been destroyed and none of the others could be found.
The Washington Examiner said Clinton, at one point, “she thought the classified ‘C’ markings on emails recovered … were just a way to put paragraphs in alphabetical order.”
“When asked what the parenthetical ‘C’ meant before a paragraph … Clinton stated she did not know and could only speculate it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order,” the FBI said.
Politico’s analysis of the information was the most damaging.
“By her own admission, she had little ability to discern whether a document included sensitive information. And when she did handle sensitive materials, she relied on her subordinates to ensure that nothing important was compromised,” the report said.
“Her responses to questions from FBI investigators reveal a high-level government executive who apparently had little grasp of the nuances and complexities around the nation’s classification system – a blind spot that helped allow classified communications to pass through her private email servicer.”
Further, Reuters reported that she confirmed “she did not recall all the briefing she received on handling government records while UK.S. secretary of State because of a concussion suffered in 2012.”
Miller, on Trump’s staff, said, “Hillary Clinton is applying for a job that begins each day with a Top Secret intelligence briefing, and the notes from her FBI interview reinforce her tremendously bad judgment and dishonesty. Clinton’s secret email server was an end run around government transparency laws that wound up jeopardizing our national security and sensitive diplomatic efforts. On more than 2,000 occasions classified material was exposed on her private server, including highly sensitive Top Secret information and intelligence. All of this was done to conceal what we are once again seeing in the latest email productions from the State Department: rampant conflicts of interest and a pay-to-play culture that rewarded Clinton Foundation donors with access and favors.”
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