Washington:The FBI has submitted to Congress documents related to its investigation into email scandal of Hillary Clinton when she was the Secretary of State and defended its decision not to criminally charge her.
The report to the Congress, among others, includes notes from the interviews of Clinton, 68, and other witnesses in the investigation.
“Ultimately, the FBI did not recommend prosecution based on an assessment of the facts and a review of how these statutes have been charged in the past,” said Jason V Herring from the FBI in his letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
At the same time, the FBI said this is not to say that someone else who engaged in this type of conduct would face no consequences for handling classified information in a similar manner if they were still a government employee.
“For example, there are potentially severe administrative consequences within the FBI for security violations involving the mishandling of classified information, up to and including security clearance revocation and dismissal,” he said.
“The FBI is in the process of providing relevant information to other US Government agencies to conduct further security and administrative reviews they deem appropriate for their respective employees,” he wrote.
The FBI also sent a letter to lawmakers to present its rationale for refusing charge Clinton in the case.
The FBI letter argues that the fact that Secretary Clinton received emails containing “(C)” portion markings is not clear evidence of knowledge or intent.
“As the (FBI) Director has testified, the FBI’s investigation uncovered three instances of emails portioned marked with ‘(C)’, a marking ostensibly indicating the presence of information classified at the Confidential level,” he wrote.
“In each of these instances, the Secretary did not originate the information; instead, the emails were forwarded to her by staff members, with the portion-marked information located within the email chains and without header and footer markings indicating the presence of classified information,” Herring said.
“Moreover, only one of those emails was determined by the State Department to contain classified information. There has been no determination by the State Department as to whether these three emails were classified at the time they were sent,” he wrote.