KUSA - The yearlong investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was Secretary of State is over. There will be no charges, after the FBI reviewed thousands upon thousands of her emails.
"We are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case,” said FBI Director James Comey.
Here’s what the FBI says it found:
- 110 emails on Clinton’s personal server contained classified information
- 8 email chains had top secret information
- 36 email chains had secret information
But the FBI says it found no evidence of intent to violate the law.
In some ways, the nature of the case involving specific emails may have made it easier for the FBI to draw conclusions, according to former FBI agent Kevin Knierim of the Denver-based forensic investigative group Cyopsis.
“With forensic stuff, it sort of is what it is,” Knierim said. “You need less human interaction in the beginning, and along the way, than you would on another type of investigation.”
An investigation that the FBI found was not something that could be prosecuted based on their findings.
“Typically, the prosecutors will not pursue a case if the investigating agency says there is no basis for which a reasonable prosecutor would bring charges,” said 9NEWS legal analyst Scott Robinson.
Robinson also said the case lacked any comparable precedents, especially since other previous Secretaries of State had also used private email servers.
“There’s no precedent at all for charging a previous Secretary of State based on how he or she used their email,” he said. “Previous Secretaries of State used some of the same procedures that Hillary Clinton used. So, she could always point to the fact that her predecessors were likewise careless in the way that they handled classified emails – but this is anything but an exoneration of Hillary Clinton.”
That likely means that while the investigation is over, the discussion about it will run through Election Day.
