FBI won't recommend charges against Hillary Clinton for personal email server

WASHINGTON — FBI Director James Comey announced Tuesday that he will recommend no charges against Hillary Clinton about her use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State.

"Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case," Comey said in a news conference. %

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"In looking back at our investigations into the mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts," he added.

He said that the FBI spent "a tremendous amount of work over the last year" and now the case is headed to the Department of Justice who have the ultimate say when it comes to any "prosecutive decision."

Comey noted that investigators read all of Clinton's 30,000 emails that were provided to the State Department in 2014.

The FBI said that it examined all 30,000 emails during it's probe. More than 100 emails had classified information when they were sent. Eight were considered top secret at the time they were sent.

Clinton gave a voluntary interview for 3 1/2 hours on Saturday at FBI headquarters in Washington, her campaign said.

"I've been eager to do it, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to assist the department in bringing its review to a conclusion," Clinton said in describing the FBI session to NBC's "Meet the Press". She agreed that the tone of the session was civil and business-like.

The Justice Department's yearlong probe has come to a close only four weeks before she is set to be formally nominated as the Democrats' choice to succeed President Barack Obama.

Now that Clinton and her aides are exonerated, it might help brush aside a major distraction throughout her campaign that has made many voters question her trustworthiness.

But as the past week shows, the case is complicated. Clinton sat down with the FBI just days after her husband, former President Bill Clinton, walked across a hot airport tarmac in Phoenix for an impromptu meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Lynch's husband. The couple had just landed.

The nation's top law enforcement official later expressed regret that she had met with the former president, whose plane was about to depart Phoenix, even though she said it was social in nature and they did not discuss the email review. Bill Clinton nominated Lynch as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York in 1999.

Lynch said Friday that she intended to accept the findings and recommendations of career prosecutors who have spent months investigating the case. As far as the meeting with Clinton, she said in hindsight that she would not do it again.

Cox Media Group