On Tuesday, July 5, 2016, Mr. Comey conducted a fifteen-minute press briefing detailing the elements of the crime of mishandling national defense information, specifically Title 18 U.S.C. §793(f) and the FBI’s investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s use of an outlaw email server.
Comey provided the following detailed examples of how Mrs. Clinton violated the law: “110 e-mails 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 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information.”
Comey charged that former Secretary of State Clinton (and her colleagues), “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” And he confirmed 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.” With respect to Mrs. Clinton’s culpability in the compromise of national defense information to hostile actors, Mr. Comey stated: “We do assess that hostile actors gained access to...
