Do the American People Want an “Extremely Careless” President? FBI Director James Comey’s Statement On Hillary Clinton’s Emails.
No criminal charges against Hillary Clinton. That was to be expected. Political pressure was exerted on both the FBI and the Justice Department.
It should nonetheless be noted that the FBI confirmed that there was on the part of Hillary Clinton “evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information”
Moreover, the FBI statement describes Hillary Clinton as “extremely careless in … the handling of very sensitive, highly classified information”.
What kind of decision-making can we expect if Hillary Clinton were to be elected president of the United States. Do the American people want an “extremely careless” president who has been under prior investigation by the the FBI. The question of carelessness is of particular relevance in relation to US Foreign Policy. Hillary Clinton is on record: she supports the use of nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis,
“the nuclear option should not at all be taken off the table. That has been my position consistently.” (ABC News, December 15, 2015)Bear in mind this FBI report below does not address the alleged fraudulent activities of the Clinton Foundation. (M. Ch. GR Editor)
“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m president, we will attack Iran. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.” (ABC “Good Morning America.”, quoted by Reuters, April 22, 2008)
“Let’s remember here… the people we are fighting today [Al Qaeda, Daesh-ISIS] we funded them twenty years ago… and we did it because we were locked in a struggle with the Soviet Union. (Transcript of CNN interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd0fLAbV1cA )
FULL TRANSCRIPT OF FBI JAMES COMEY’S STATEMENT
emphasis added by Global Research
Good morning. I’m here to give you an
update on the FBI’s investigation of Secretary Clinton’s use of a
personal e-mail system during her time as Secretary of State.
After a tremendous amount of work
over the last year, the FBI is completing its investigation and
referring the case to the Department of Justice for a prosecutive
decision. What I would like to do today is tell you three
things: what we did; what we found; and what we are recommending to the
Department of Justice.
This will be an unusual statement in at
least a couple ways. First, I am going to include more detail about our
process than I ordinarily would, because I think the American people
deserve those details in a case of intense public interest. Second, I
have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the
Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not
know what I am about to say.
I want to start by thanking the FBI
employees who did remarkable work in this case. Once you have a better
sense of how much we have done, you will understand why I am so grateful
and proud of their efforts.
Video on CSPAN of FBI Director James Comey’s Statement
So, first, what we have done:
The investigation began as a referral
from the Intelligence Community Inspector General in connection with
Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail server during her time as
Secretary of State. The referral focused on whether classified
information was transmitted on that personal system.
Our investigation looked at whether there
is evidence classified information was improperly stored or transmitted
on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making it a
felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a
grossly negligent way, or a second statute making it a misdemeanor to
knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or
storage facilities.
Consistent with our counterintelligence
responsibilities, we have also investigated to determine whether there
is evidence of computer intrusion in connection with the personal e-mail
server by any foreign power, or other hostile actors.
I have so far used the singular term,
“e-mail server,” in describing the referral that began our
investigation. It turns out to have been more complicated than that.
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.
As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken
out of service, stored, and decommissioned in various ways. Piecing all
of that back together — to gain as full an understanding as possible of
the ways in which personal e-mail was used for government work — has
been a painstaking undertaking, requiring thousands of hours of effort.
For example, when one of Secretary
Clinton’s original personal servers was decommissioned in 2013, the
e-mail software was removed. Doing that didn’t remove the e-mail
content, but it was like removing the frame from a huge finished jigsaw
puzzle and dumping the pieces on the floor. The effect was that millions
of e-mail fragments end up unsorted in the server’s unused — or “slack”
— space. We searched through all of it to see what was there, and what
parts of the puzzle could be put back together.
FBI investigators have also read all of
the approximately 30,000 e-mails provided by Secretary Clinton to the
State Department in December 2014. Where an e-mail was assessed as
possibly containing classified information, the FBI referred the e-mail
to any U.S. government agency that was a likely “owner” of information
in the e-mail, so that agency could make a determination as to whether
the e-mail contained classified information at the time it was sent or
received, or whether there was reason to classify the e-mail now, even
if its content was not classified at the time it was sent (that is the
process sometimes referred to as “up-classifying”).
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.
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. We found those
additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the
years and we found traces of them on devices that supported or were
connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the
archived government e-mail accounts of people who had been government
employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking
officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might
naturally correspond.
This helped us recover work-related
e-mails that were not among the 30,000 produced to State. Still others
we recovered from the laborious review of the millions of e-mail
fragments dumped into the slack space of the server decommissioned in
2013.
With respect to the thousands of e-mails we found that were not among those produced to State, agencies have concluded that three of those were classified at the time they were sent or received, one at the Secret level and two at the Confidential level. There were no additional Top Secret e-mails found. Finally, none of those we found have since been “up-classified.”
I should add here that we found no
evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were
intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them. Our assessment is
that, like many e-mail users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted
e-mails or e-mails were purged from the system when devices were
changed. Because she was not using a government account — or even a
commercial account like Gmail — there was no archiving at all of her
e-mails, so it is not surprising that we discovered e-mails that were
not on Secretary Clinton’s system in 2014, when she produced the 30,000
e-mails to the State Department.
It could also be that some of the
additional work-related e-mails we recovered were among those deleted as
“personal” by Secretary Clinton’s lawyers when they reviewed and sorted
her e-mails for production in 2014.
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, and that we
later found them, for example, in 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.
We have conducted interviews and done
technical examination to attempt to understand how that sorting was done
by her attorneys. Although we do not have complete visibility because
we are not able to fully reconstruct the electronic record of that
sorting, we believe our investigation has been sufficient to give us
reasonable confidence there was no intentional misconduct in connection
with that sorting effort.
And, of course, in addition to our
technical work, we interviewed many people, from those involved in
setting up and maintaining the various iterations of Secretary Clinton’s
personal server, to staff members with whom she corresponded on e-mail,
to those involved in the e-mail production to State, and finally,
Secretary Clinton herself.
Last, we have done extensive work
to understand what indications there might be of compromise by hostile
actors in connection with the personal e-mail operation.
That’s what we have done. Now let me tell you what we found:
Although we did not find clear evidence
that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws
governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.
For example, seven e-mail chains concern
matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program
level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary
Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails
from others about the same matters. There is evidence to support a
conclusion 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 that conversation. In addition to
this highly sensitive information, we also found information that was
properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the
time it was discussed on e-mail (that is, excluding the later
“up-classified” e-mails).
None of these e-mails should have been on
any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially
concerning because all of these e-mails were housed on unclassified
personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff, like
those found at Departments and Agencies of the U.S. Government — or even
with a commercial service like Gmail.
Separately, it 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.
While not the focus of our investigation,
we also developed evidence that the security culture of the State
Department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified e-mail
systems in particular, was generally lacking in the kind of care for
classified information found elsewhere in the government.
With respect to potential computer
intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that
Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various
configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. But, given the
nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess
that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence. 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. We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a
personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and
readily apparent. 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.
So that’s what we found. Finally, with respect to our recommendation to the Department of Justice:
In our system, the prosecutors
make the decisions about whether charges are appropriate based on
evidence the FBI has helped collect. Although we don’t normally make
public our recommendations to the prosecutors, we frequently make
recommendations and engage in productive conversations with prosecutors
about what resolution may be appropriate, given the evidence. In this
case, given the importance of the matter, I think unusual transparency
is in order.
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.
Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing
charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the
evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also
consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations
have been handled in the past.
In looking back at our investigations
into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a
case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All
the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional
and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of
materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of
intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United
States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.
To be clear, this is not to suggest that
in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would
face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often
subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we
are deciding now.
As a result, although the Department of
Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to
Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.
I know there will be intense public
debate in the wake of this recommendation, as there was throughout this
investigation. What I can assure the American people is that this
investigation was done competently, honestly, and independently. No
outside influence of any kind was brought to bear.
I know there were many opinions expressed
by people who were not part of the investigation—including people in
government — but none of that mattered to us. Opinions are irrelevant,
and they were all uninformed by insight into our investigation, because
we did the investigation the right way. Only facts matter, and the FBI
found them here in an entirely apolitical and professional way. I
couldn’t be prouder to be part of this organization.
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Prof Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 2016
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