The FBI recommended that Hillary Clinton should face no criminal charges in the investigation over the use of her private email as secretary of state. FBI Director James Comey announced no prosecutor should bring a case because there is no evidence Clinton acted intentionally, although there was evidence Clinton acted improperly and may have been hacked. WATCH VIEW
Read the full transcript here: Remarks prepared for delivery at
press briefing.
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.
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.
