FBI Recommends No Charges; Wikileaks Leaks 30,000 Hillary Clinton Emails

7/5/2016
Updated:
7/15/2016

As promised by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Wikileaks has released a large amount of information taken from Hillary Clinton’s private server.

Wikileaks prefaces the email archive of over 30,000 emails by saying, “On March 16, 2016 WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive for 30,322 emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was Secretary of State. The 50,547 pages of documents span from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. 7,570 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton. The emails were made available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the US State Department as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. The final PDFs were made available on February 29, 2016.”

Previously, in an interview with British television, Assange said that the emails should contain enough evidence to indict Clinton if the government wished to do so.

“There’s very strong material, both in the emails and in relation to the Clinton Foundation. For example, we published an email where Hillary Clinton is instructing her staff to remove the classified document and send it by non-classified fax. So that just requires one more thing, which is to show that the document was actually sent. But she instructed her staff to violate those classification procedures in the United States,” Assange said. 

However, he doesn’t believe it will happen, as the Federal Government wouldn’t allow her indictment.

“She (Head of U.S. Department of Justice Loretta Lynch) is not going to indict Hillary Clinton, that’s not possible. But the FBI can push for concessions from the new Clinton government in exchange for its likely indictment.”

FBI Decision

In a news briefing posted on Tuesday, July 5, FBI announced that they had completed a thorough and intensive investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email system. 

FBI director James Comey went on to explain at length the procedural steps involved in the investigation, which called for a reading of almost all 30,000 e-mails and an assessment of whether the email contained classified information. In the end, 110 emails in 52 chains were determined to have classified information, with eight of those chains containing “Top Secret”information, 36 chains contained “Secret information,” and eight containing “Confidential information.”

Comey deemed that Clinton and her colleagues were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” but said that ultimately they did not recommend criminal charges in the investigation.

“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,” Comey said.