5 ways Comey contradicted Clinton's email claims
On several key points, the FBI director refuted several rationales behind her private server.
By RACHAEL BADE
07/05/16 05:39 PM EDT
Clinton said there's "no evidence” that her server was hacked, but Comey and the FBI have determined it's very "possible" her system was breached | AP Photo
FBI Director James Comey tore up Hillary Clinton's email script on Tuesday.
During a highly unusual news conference, Comey directly contradicted several of Clinton's statements about her private server — refuting her claims that she turned over all her work-related messages as well as her vow that she didn’t send or receive “anything that was classified at the time.”
With public polls showing that many Americans don't find Clinton trustworthy, Comey's assertions are sure to provide new ammunition for the 2016 Democratic frontrunner’s political opponents. Here are five of his sharpest rebukes of the Clinton email narrative:
1.) "I did not send nor receive anything that was classified at the time.”
When the news broke in early 2015 that Clinton had used a private email sever while she was secretary of State, she was quick to say that she wasn't using it for sensitive or classified communications.
"I did not send nor receive anything that was classified at the time," Clinton said at a campaign stop in Iowa last July.
As the email scandal has continued to dog Clinton, her campaign staff and the candidate herself have said repeatedly that State only classifies information when someone from the public requests it, via the Freedom of Information Act, for example. They argued that any emails from Clinton deemed “classified” were upgraded to that status after the fact.
But Comey said on Tuesday that the FBI had found at least 110 emails that were classified at the time Clinton sent or received them. That includes eight chains deemed “top secret” — the nation’s most sensitive information.
“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,” Comey said. “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.”
And Clinton should have known that she was working with classified information, Comey added. While his agents found zero evidence to suggest Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing classified information, his agents uncovered “evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” he said.
“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,” Comey said.
Comey also knocked down another Clinton argument that none of the messages was "marked" classified at the time they were sent or received. The FBI director said the investigation found that some were marked classified -- and the markings shouldn't have made a difference, either way.
“Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information,” he said. “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.”
2.) “I have provided all my work-related emails.”
After the State Department asked Clinton to turn over all her email correspondence from her tenure as secretary, Clinton has said she did just that.
"I have provided all of my work-related emails, and I've asked that they be made public, and I think that demonstrates that I wanted to make sure that this information was part of the official records," Clinton said on ABC News less than two months ago.
Comey, however, said the FBI has proof that she did not turn “thousands” of work-related messages — and that there could be many more that will remain undiscovered.
“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,” Comey said, noting that his agents found them “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."
Comey speculated that official records were lost in part because Clinton followed typical deletion practices.
“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,” he said. “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,” he said.
3.) Clinton campaign: lawyers read through all emails before deleting the rest.
The Clinton campaign has said that her lawyers read through all of her State-era emails to ensure that all her official records were turned over to the department, and therefore, the public. Only after they had been vetted by her lawyers were the remaining personal emails deleted.
Just a few days after news of her used of private email server broke, Clinton’s campaign said that lawyers read through every email to ensure they handed over all public records.
But Comey says her attorneys “did not individually read the content of all of her emails."
“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,” he said.
That means that a substantial number of work-related messages were probably deleted, he continued: "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."
4.) “I opted for convenience to use my personal email account.”
Clinton has said she used a personal email server because she didn’t want to deal with the hassle of having two devices: one for work, the other for personal use.
“[W]hen I got to work as Secretary of State, I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two,” she said during a March 2015 news conference on her private email.
But Comey said Clinton actually “used several different servers and administrators” and “used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain.” That would seem to undermine Clinton's simplicity rationale.
“I have so far used the singular term, 'e-mail server,' in describing the referral that began our investigation,” Comey said. “It turns out to have been more complicated than that.”
He gave one example: In 2013, Clinton’s original personal server was decommissioned, the email software was removed from the server, which he described as “removing the frame from a huge finished jigsaw puzzle and dumping the pieces on the floor.”
“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,” he said, later adding: “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.”
5.) “No evidence” that server was hacked.
Clinton has said numerous times that her server was never hacked — most recently, that there was "no evidence" of hacking by outside intelligence agents.
But Comey and the FBI have determined it's at the very least "possible" her system was breached, given the unsecured technology used.
“Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account,” Comey said, though he noted they “did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked.”
The FBI thinks it may have happened because they found 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.”
“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,” he said.
Read more: 5 ways Comey contradicted Clinton's email claims
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Obama turned on the people that supported his pathetic ass.
how old are you? serious question because if you are a teenager or a college student you won't understand