It’s been so long since the original round of “but her email” stories, that it seems worth a brief review.
Hillary Clinton set up the server at her home in 2009. Clinton did not have an email account on any actual State Department server, which used systems at the time that were regarded as both clumsy and insecure. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell also used a personal email account during his time in office and wrote to Clinton to explain how he had operated.
The private server had already been shut down for two years when the New York Times ran a front-page story in 2015, suggesting that the server violated federal guidelines. It was only after that story ran, with Clinton already the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, that Republicans in the House and Senate seized on the server as a point of weakness. In the next year, they held more hours of hearings on Clinton’s use of email than had been held on the 9/11 attacks.
An FBI investigation into the server was initiated, even though everyone acknowledge that the server use was in a very “gray area,” with both laws and regulations concerning such email accounts changing frequently both during the time Clinton served as secretary of State and after. The FBI determined that 110 of the emails that appeared on the server over a four-year period had been, at some point, classified, but only three of them appeared to carry any indicators that they contained classified material. In July 2016, then-FBI director James Comey made an extraordinary public announcement that Clinton had been “careless” in handling the email system, though the FBI found no evidence that the system had been violated, and recommended that no charges be filed.
In October, just over a week before the election, Comey issued a note that he was reopening the investigation to look at emails found on a laptop belonging to former Congressman Anthony Weiner, who was the husband of one of Clinton’s aides. That investigation found no sign of additional classified material. Polls have suggested that this letter by, on its own, was enough to tip the balance of the election.
And that is … pretty much it. Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server, even though it reflected the actions of the previous secretary of State—which merited exactly zero investigations—has since been inflated into such a High Crime that Republicans are quick to condemn her to prison, if not death, even though few of them could explain even the basics of what she did wrong.
After Republicans insisted that the Inspector General look into the FBI investigation of this non-issue, a second report was issued in 2018 stating that there was no evidence that prosecutors were affected by bias. However, that report chastised Comey for violating department rules through his public announcements both at the time of the July 2016 report and the announcement that the investigation was being reopened in the week before the election.
That final Inspector General report confirmed that the agency was “fairly confident” that Clinton’s servers had not been violated.
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