The Five Lies Comey Reveals
1. Hillary Never Sent Or Received Classified Emails
On March 10, 2016 Hillary Clinton stated categorically,
"I did not e-mail any classified material to anyone on my e-mail. There is no classified material. I’m certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material."
Comey said:
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. 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. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.
2. Hillary Never Sent Or Received Emails MARKED Classified
At a Las Vegas press conference on August 18th 2015, Clinton said
"Whether it was a personal account or a government account, I did not send classified material and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified, which is the way you know whether something is."
Comey:
[A] very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. 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.
3. Hillary’s Lawyers Read Every Email While Sorting Personal Correspondence vs Government
Hillary Clinton and her lawyers have long claimed that every email was read to determine whether or not it was work-related or personal.
Clinton press secretary Nick Merrill had told
Time Magazine that her attorneys had individually read every email to determine if it was a government document or personal correspondence. "Every one of the more than 60,000 emails were read. Period."
Not so according to Comey.
Comey:
The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; 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. 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.
4. Hillary Turned Over All Work-Related Emails To Investigators
Hillary claimed that all of her work-related emails had been turned over to the State Department.
"I have absolute confidence that everything that could be in any way connected to work is now in the possession of the State Department," Clinton claimed in March of 2015.
Comey:
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. We found those additional e-mails 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 at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might naturally correspond. This helped us recover work-related e-mails that were not among the 30,000 produced to State. Still others we recovered from the laborious review of the millions of e-mail fragments dumped into the slack space of the server decommissioned in 2013.
Director Comey also stated that there were some work-related emails that were permanently deleted, and will likely never to be found:
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.
5. Hillary’s Emails Couldn’t Have Been Compromised
Comey:
With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. But, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence. We do assess 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. We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. 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. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.
