SOURCE: Associated Press
URL:
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/6ee62bc1899d45b1980f09fe750a7105/ap-fact-check-clinton-email-claims-collapse-under-fbi-probeby: By STEPHEN BRAUN and JACK GILLUM
Key assertions by Hillary Clinton in defense of her email practices have collapsed under FBI scrutiny.
The agency's yearlong investigation found that she did not, as she claimed, turn over all her work-related messages for release. It found that her private email server did carry classified emails, also contrary to her past statements. And it made clear that Clinton used many devices to send and receive email despite her statements that she set up her email system so that she only needed to carry one.
FBI Director James Comey's announcement Tuesday that he will not refer criminal charges to the Justice Department against Clinton spared her from prosecution and a devastating political predicament. But it left much of her account in tatters and may have aggravated questions of trust swirling around her Democratic presidential candidacy.
A look at Clinton's claims since questions about her email practices as secretary of state surfaced and how they compare with facts established in the FBI probe:
CLINTON: "I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material." News conference, March 2015.
THE FACTS: Actually, the FBI identified at least 113 emails that passed through Clinton's server and contained materials that were classified at the time they were sent, including some that were Top Secret and referred to a highly classified special access program, Comey said.
Most of those emails — 110 of them — were included among 30,000 emails that Clinton returned to the State Department around the time her use of a private email server was discovered. The three others were recovered from a forensic analysis of Clinton's server. "Any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton's position or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about the matters should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation," Comey said. Clinton and her aides "were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," he said.
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CLINTON: "I never received nor sent any material that was marked classified." NBC interview, July 2016.
THE FACTS: Clinton has separately clung to her rationale that there were no classification markings on her emails that would have warned her and others not to transmit the sensitive material. But the private system did, in fact, handle emails that bore markings indicating they contained classified information, Comey said.
He said the marked emails were "a very small number." But that's not the only standard for judging how officials handle sensitive material, he added. "Even if information is not marked classified in an email, participants who know, or should know, that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it."
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