While FBI Director James Comey’s controversial announcement that the FBI will not be recommending that Hillary Clinton be indicted may have her breathing a big sigh of relief today, it was not all good news for the Democrat presumptive nominee. During the course of his 15-minute press conference, Comey completely demolished all of her favorite email excuses, many of which are still available for viewing on her “factsheet,” The Facts About Hillary Clinton’s Emails.
Most of these lies reached their expiration date in May when the devastating State Department IG audit came out. But today it was made clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that Crooked Hillary has been repeatedly lying her pantsuits off about her emails for over a year now. While Comey may not be recommending that Clinton be charged with any federal crimes, his list of damning facts that directly contradict her “facts” should indict her in the court of public opinion.
Here is a compare-and-contrast factcheck via the AP:
CLINTON: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.” News conference, March 2015.
THE FACTS: Actually, the FBI identified at least 113 emails that passed through Clinton’s server and contained materials that were classified at the time they were sent, including some that were Top Secret and referred to a highly classified special access program, Comey said.
Most of those emails — 110 of them — were included among 30,000 emails that Clinton returned to the State Department around the time her use of a private email server was discovered. The three others were recovered from a forensic analysis of Clinton’s server. “Any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about the matters should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation,” Comey said. Clinton and her aides “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” he said.
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CLINTON: “I never received nor sent any material that was marked classified.” NBC interview, July 2016.
THE FACTS: Clinton has separately clung to her rationale that there were no classification markings on her emails that would have warned her and others not to transmit the sensitive material. But the private system did, in fact, handle emails that bore markings indicating they contained classified information, Comey said.
He said the marked emails were “a very small number.” But that’s not the only standard for judging how officials handle sensitive material, he added. “Even if information is not marked classified in an email, participants who know, or should know, that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.”
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CLINTON: “I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work related” to the State Department. News conference, March 2015.
THE FACTS: Not so, the FBI found.
Comey said that when his forensic team examined Clinton’s server it found there were “several thousand work-related emails that were not in the group of 30,000” that had been returned by Clinton to the State Department.
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CLINTON: “I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for personal emails instead of two.” News conference, March 2015.
THE FACTS: This reasoning for using private email both for public business and private correspondence didn’t hold up in the investigation. Clinton “used numerous mobile devices to view and send email” using her personal account, Comey said. He also said Clinton had used different servers.
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CLINTON: “It was on property guarded by the Secret Service, and there were no security breaches. … The use of that server, which started with my husband, certainly proved to be effective and secure.” News conference, March 2015.
CLINTON campaign website: “There is no evidence there was ever a breach.”
THE FACTS: The campaign website claimed “no evidence” of a breach, a less categorical statement than Clinton herself made last year, when she said there was no breach. The FBI did not uncover a breach but made clear that that possibility cannot be ruled out.
“We assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account,” Comey said.
He said evidence would be hard to find because hackers are sophisticated and can cover their tracks. Comey said his investigators learned that Clinton’s security lapses included using “her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.” Comey also noted that hackers breached the email accounts of several outsiders who messaged with Clinton.
Comey did not mention names, but a Romanian hacker who called himself Guccifer accessed and later leaked emails from Sidney Blumenthal, an outside adviser to Clinton who regularly communicated with her.
Via Reason, here is the Clinton/FBI compare/contrast in video form:
This may be the best possible outcome for Republicans in November. Clinton hasn’t been taken out of the fight, but as her email claims have completely collapsed under FBI scrutiny, so should her already low approval ratings for honesty, integrity and trustworthiness. Trump would have had a tougher time winning against nearly any other Democrat candidate — especially her most probable potential replacement, Joe Biden. Unfortunately, in our fundamentally transformed banana republic, it will be an uphill battle for Trump to win against even the “extremely careless,” unindicted email conspirator, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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