Inconvenient Truths from FBI Director James Comey

Written by Laurie Higgins

FBI director James Comey revealed some inconvenient truths in his press conference on the Hillary Clinton email scandal:

1.)  Hillary Clinton said, “I thought that it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and personal emails instead of two.”

FBI director James Comey said, “Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain.”

2.)  Hillary Clinton said, “Let me repeat what I have repeated for many months now. I never received nor sent any material that was marked classified.”

Director Comey said, “From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received….[I]t is important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.

3.)  Hillary Clinton said, “[A]fter I left office, the State Department asked former secretaries of state for our assistance in providing copies of work- related emails from our personal accounts. I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work-related

Director Comey said, “The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.

4.)  In answer to a question about the process Clinton used when having her emails deleted, Clinton said, “[M]y direction to conduct the thorough investigation was to err on the side of providing anything that could be possibly viewed as work related.”

Director Comey said, “The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related e-mails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total e-mails remaining on Secretary Clinton’s personal system in 2014. It is highly likely their search terms missed some work-related e-mails.

5.)  In a FOX News interview, President Obama said, “I continue to believe [Hillary Clinton] has not jeopardized America’s national security.”

Director Comey said, “We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account….She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.”

Hillary’s possible campaign slogan: