FBI Director James Comey FULL STATEMENT on Hillary Clinton Email Investigation (C-SPAN)

the cpan networks bring you long form public affairs programming from the nation's capital and are a public service of your television provider cpan created by cable good morning I'm here to give you an update on the FBI's investigation of secretary Clinton's use of a personal email 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 matter to the Department of Justice for a prosecutive decision what I want to do today is three things I want to tell you what we did I want to tell you what we found and I want to tell you what we're recommending to the Department of Justice this is going to be an unusual statement in at least a couple of ways first I'm 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 and and second I have not coordinated this statement or reviewed it in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government they do not know what I'm about to say but 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 so proud of their work so first what we have done this investigation began as a referral from the the intelligence Community Inspector General in connection with secretary Clinton's use of a personal email 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 that classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system in violation of a federal statute that makes 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 and consistent with our counterintelligence responsibilities we have also investigated to determine if there is evidence of computer intrusion by nation states or by hostile actors of any kind now I have so far used the singular term email 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 she also used numerous mobile devices to send and to read email 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 email was used for government work has been a painstaking undertaking requiring thousands of hours of effort for example when one of secretary Clinton's servers was decommissioned in 2013 the email software was removed that didn't remove the email content but it was like removing the frame from a huge unfinished jigs puzzle and then dumping all the pieces on the floor the effect was that millions of email fragments ended up in the serers unused or slack space we searched through all of it to understand what was there and what parts of the puzzle we could put back together again FBI investigators also read all of the approximately 30,000 emails that secretary Clinton provided to the state department in 2014 where an email was assessed as possibly containing classified information the FBI referred that email to any government agency that might be an owner of that information so that agency could make a determination as to whether the email contained classified information at the time it was sent or received or whether there was reason to classify it now even if the content had not been classified when it was first sent or received and that's the process sometimes referred to as up classifying from the group of 30,000 emails returned to the state department in 2014 110 emails in 52 email 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 of those chains contained secret information at the time and eight contained confidential information at the time that's the lowest level of classification separate from those about 2,000 additional emails were up classified to make them confidential those emails had not been classified at the time that they were sent or received the FBI also discovered several thousand work-related emails that were not among the group of 30,000 emails returned by secretary Clinton to state in 2004 14 we found those emails in a variety of ways some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on servers or devices that have been connected to the private email domain others we found by reviewing the archived government accounts of people who' been government employees at the same time as secretary Clinton including high ranking officials at other agencies folks with whom a secretary of state might normally correspond this helped us recover work rated emails that were not among the 30,000 that were produced to State still others we recovered from that painstaking review of The millions of email fragments dumped into the slack space of the server that was decommissioned in 2013 with respect to the thousands of emails we found that were not among those produced to the state department 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 emails found and 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 rated emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them in some way our assessment is that like many email users secretary Clinton periodically deleted emails or emails were purged from her system when devices were changed because she was not using a government account account or even a commercial account like Gmail there was no archiving at all of her emails so it's not surprising that we discovered emails that were not on secretary Clinton's system in 2014 when she produced those 30,000 some emails to State it could also be that some of the additional work rated emails that we've recovered were among those deleted as personal by her lawyers when they reviewed and sorted her emails for production in late 2014 the lawyers doing the Sorting for secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her emails as we did for those available to us instead they relied on Header information and they Ed Search terms to try to find all work rated emails among the reportedly more than 60,000 that were remaining on her system at the end of 2014 it's highly likely that their search missed some work rated emails and that we later found them for example in the mailboxes of other officials or in the slack space of a server it's also likely that there are other work-related emails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere and that are now gone because they deleted all emails they did not produce to State and the loyers then clean their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery we have conducted interviews and done technical examination to attempt to understand exactly how that sorting was done done by her attorneys although we don't have complete visibility because we're 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 the personal email system and maintaining the various iterations of secretary Clinton server to staff members with whom she corresponded on email to those involved in the email production to State and finally secretary Clinton herself last we have done extensive work to try to understand what indications there might be of compromise by hostile actors in connection with that personal email system so that's what we've 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 email chains concern matters that were classified at the top secret special Access program at the time they were sent and received those chains involve secretary Clinton both sending emails about those matters and receiving emails about those same matters there is evidence to to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton's position or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about those 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 US intelligence community at the time it was discussed on email that is excluding any later up classified emails none of these emails should have been on any kind of unclassified system but their presence is especially concerning because all of these emails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff like those found at agencies and Departments of the United States government or even with a commercial email service like Gmail I think it's also important to say something about the marking of classified information only a very small number of the emails here containing classifi information bore markings that indicated the presence of classified information but even if information is not Mark classified in an email participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it and 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 the use of unclassified systems in particular was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information that's found elsewhere in the US government with respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors we did not find direct evidence that secretary Clinton's personal email domain in its various configurations since 2009 was hacked successfully but given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved we assess we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence we do assess that that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email 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 email domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent she also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States including sending and receiving work rated emails 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 email 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 that the FBI helps 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 deciding whether to bring charges they 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 the 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 information 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 to the contrary those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions but that's not what we're 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 the investigation what I can assure the American people is that this investigation was done honestly competently and independently no outside influence of any kind was brought to bear I know there were many opinions expressed by people who are 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 our investigation the right way only facts matter and the FBI found them here in an entirely a political and professional way I couldn't be prouder to be part of this organization thank you very much director

Channel: C-SPAN

Views: 270,072

Keywords: FBI, James Comey, HIllary Clinton, State Department, C-SPAN, CSPAN

Id: ghph_361wa0

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 05 2016