FBI director James Comey announced on Tuesday morning that he would not be recommending that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton be prosecuted for mis-handling classified information. But in the course of his presentation, he demonstrated that literally everything she and her campaign had told America about her email servers was a complete lie.
1. FALSE: Hillary Clinton never sent any classified information, or emails containing information marked “classified.” Comey concluded that “a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information.” He also noted: “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.” And he noted:
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. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.
2. FALSE: Hillary Clinton turned over all work-related emails to the State Department. Comey: “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.” He added that Clinton’s lawyers left those out because they “did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails.” And he added that : “three of those [deleted e-mails] were classified at the time they were sent or received.”
3. FALSE: Hillary Clinton was allowed to use a private e-mail server. Comey noted that “any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for” some of the information she was sharing. And he concluded that she was “extremely careless” with classified information, though he would not recommend prosecution.
4. FALSE: Hillary Clinton’s server was not hacked by foreign adversaries. Clinton claimed it was impossible that her server was hacked. But Comey said: “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.”
5. FALSE: Hillary Clinton had only used a single mobile device for email. Comey noted the use of multiple e-mail devices, and multiple servers: “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.”
6. FALSE: Hillary Clinton’s lawyers had read every single one of her emails before deleting the “personal” ones. As Time notes:
Clinton press secretary Nick Merrill previously told TIME that her attorneys had individually read every email to determine if it was a government document or personal correspondence. “Every one of the more than 60,000 emails were read. Period,” Merrill wrote in one email to a TIME reporter dated March 14, 2015.
The FBI concluded that this claim was false.
7. FALSE: Hillary Clinton had no intention of deleting emails or “wiping” her servers. Comey noted a deliberate effort by Clinton’s lawyers to cover her tracks by destroying information: “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.”
If anything demonstrates intent, it is surely Clinton’s repeated evasion of the law, and her constant lies and cover-ups.
But the Department of Justice will certainly decline to prosecute, meaning that only the voters can keep Hillary Clinton out of office.
This post has been updated with new information — specifically, items #4, #5, #6 and #7.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, will be published by Regnery on July 25 and is available for pre-order through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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