New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte (Courtesy – Gage Skidmore – Flickr)
New Hampshire U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte said plenty in the single paragraph statement she released in response to news that Hillary Clinton has in all likelihood escaped without punishment for her handling of classified information on a private email server.
“Despite finding evidence that Secretary Clinton was ‘extremely careless’ and potentially broke the law by mishandling classified information, the FBI’s recommendation against pursuing charges suggests that she gets to play by a different set of rules than everyone else,” Ayotte said Tuesday. “The lives of Americans depend on the protection of classified information, and failing to enforce the law in this case sets a dangerous precedent for our national security.”
FBI Director James Comey said “no charges are appropriate in the case,” and Attorney General Loretta Lynch said last week that she would accept the recommendations of the FBI director and of career prosecutors.
Comey made that statement after he delivered a blistering review of Clinton’s actions, saying the FBI found that 110 emails were sent or received on Clinton’s server containing classified information. He saidClinton and her aides were “extremely careless” and added that it was possible that people hostile to the U.S. had gained access to her personal email account.
Yet he added that after looking at similar circumstances, the agency believed that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
The announcement came three days after the FBI interviewed Clinton for hours in a final step of its yearlong investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information.
Though his recommendation apparently ends the legal threat, it’s unlikely to wipe away many voters’ concerns about Clinton’s trustworthiness. And it probably won’t stop Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has called for criminal charges, from continuing to make the server a campaign issue.
Clnton’s personal email server, which she relied on exclusively for government and personal business, has dogged her campaign since The Associated Press revealed its existence in March 2015.
She has repeatedly said that no email she sent or received was marked classified, but the Justice Department began investigating last summer following a referral from the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence community.
The scrutiny was compounded by a critical audit in May from the State Department’s inspector general, the agency’s internal watchdog, which said that Clinton and her team ignored clear warnings from department officials that her email setup violated federal standards and could leave sensitive material vulnerable to hackers. Clinton declined to talk to the inspector general, but the audit said that she had feared “the personal being accessible” if she used a government email account.
The Clinton campaign said agents interviewed her this past Saturday for three and one-half hours at FBI headquarters. Agents had earlier interviewed top Clinton aides including her former State Department chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, and Huma Abedin, a longtime aide who now is the vice chairwoman of Clinton’s campaign.
Lynch on Friday said that she would accept whatever findings and recommendations were presented to her. Though she said she had already settled on that process, her statement came days after an impromptu meeting with Bill Clinton on her airplane in Phoenix that she acknowledged had led to questions about the neutrality of the investigation.
New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte (Courtesy – Gage Skidmore – Flickr) 
