FBI Director says Clinton was "careless," but the agency's investigations found "no intentional misconduct"

Jul 5, 2016 21:05 GMT  ·  By

In a press conference held today, FBI Director James Comey has said his agency will recommend the US Department of Justice (DoJ) not to press official charges against Hillary Clinton, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2016 United States presidential election.

Comey has announced that the FBI's investigation found "no intentional misconduct" on behalf of Clinton and her staff when they had set up private email servers without the approval or knowledge of official state agencies.

The DoJ and Attorney General Loretta Lynch are not forced to accept the FBI's recommendation, but according to a New York Times article from last Friday, Lynch said she would accept the Bureau's decision.

FBI: 110 Clinton emails contained classified information

The FBI's recommendation comes after a year-long investigation into the actions of Hillary Clinton, who exclusively used a private email server while serving as US Secretary of State.

The State Department's inspector general exposed the existence of this email server in March 2015, when it was revealed that Clinton had handled top secret documents via her unsanctioned email server.

During the FBI's subsequent investigation, the Bureau recovered over 30,000 work-related emails from Clinton's private server, interviewing much of her staff.

Of these 110 emails, 52 email chains contained classified information. Eight email chains included information labeled as "top secret," at the time, 36 as "secret," and eight as "confidential."

Clinton staff didn't hand over all the emails

In a statement also published today, the FBI says the lawyers who sorted through Clinton's emails didn't properly classify work and personal emails during the investigation, and there were many work-related emails categorized as personal out of the total of 60,000 emails.

The FBI details they were able to recover these files from "the mailboxes of other officials or in the slack space of a server."

"It is also likely that there are other work-related e-mails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all e-mails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery," the FBI adds.

FBI Director Comey has stressed that "no charges are appropriate in this case," but reprimanded Clinton on her actions, which he has called "extremely careless."

Public reaction to Comey's announcement has been very negative, since the FBI's statements are quite contradictory since they've admitted that confidential information was leaked outside official channels but have not taken any legal action.

UPDATE: As initially reported, the DoJ has decided not to file official charges against Hillary Clinton, following the FBI's advice.