WASHINGTON
— The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, told Congress on Sunday that he
had seen no evidence in a recently discovered trove of emails to change
his conclusion that Hillary Clinton should face no charges over her handling of classified information.
Mr.
Comey’s announcement, just two days before the election, was an effort
to clear the cloud of suspicion he had publicly placed over her
presidential campaign late last month when he alerted Congress that the F.B.I. would examine the emails.
“Based
on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in
July with respect to Secretary Clinton,” Mr. Comey wrote in a letter to the leaders of several congressional committees. He said agents had reviewed all communications to and from Mrs. Clinton in the new trove from when she was secretary of state.
The letter was a dramatic final twist in a tumultuous nine days for both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Comey, who drew widespread criticism
for announcing that the F.B.I. had discovered new emails that might be
relevant to its investigation of Mrs. Clinton, which ended in July with
no charges. That criticism of Mr. Comey from both parties is likely to
persist after the election.
Document: Letter From F.B.I. Related to Clinton Email Case
While
the new letter was clear as it related to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Comey’s
message was otherwise vague. He did not say that agents had completed
their review of the emails, or that they were abandoning the matter in
regard to her aides. But federal law enforcement officials said that
they considered the review of emails related to Mrs. Clinton’s server
complete, and that Mr. Comey’s letter was intended to convey that.
One
senior law enforcement official said that as recently as Friday, it was
not clear whether the review would be completed by Election Day. But
after days of working in shifts around the clock, teams of
counterintelligence agents and technology specialists at the bureau’s
headquarters in Washington finished their examination of the thousands
of emails. Officials had decided to make their decision public as soon
as they had reached it, to avoid any suggestion that they were
suppressing information.
According
to the law enforcement official, many of the emails were personal
messages or duplicates of ones that the bureau had previously examined
during the original inquiry.
Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, said in a post on Twitter that the campaign had always believed she would be cleared of any wrongdoing.
Graphic: These Are the Bad (and Worse) Options James Comey Faced
“We
were always confident nothing would cause the July decision to be
revisited,” Mr. Fallon said. “Now Director Comey has confirmed it.”
Kellyanne Conway, Donald J. Trump’s
campaign manager, lamented the fact that Mr. Comey had again inserted
himself into the election, but she predicted that his conclusion would
have no impact on the outcome.
“The
investigation has been mishandled from the beginning,” Ms. Conway said
on MSNBC, arguing that Mrs. Clinton had wasted taxpayer money and
federal resources because of her email practices. “She was reckless, she
was careless, she was selfish.”
The
new review began after agents discovered a cache of emails in early
October in an unrelated investigation into the disgraced former
congressman Anthony D. Weiner, the estranged husband of one of Mrs.
Clinton’s closest aides. When searching Mr. Weiner’s laptop for evidence
of whether he had exchanged illicit messages with a teenage girl, they
discovered emails belonging to the aide, Huma Abedin.
On the Trail: Sunday, Nov. 6
CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
That
announcement renewed talk of an investigation that had shadowed Mrs.
Clinton for much of the Democratic primary campaign. She and her aides
had been under investigation for improperly storing classified
information on Mrs. Clinton’s private email server. The discovery of new
emails raised the prospect that the laptop might have new information
that would renew the F.B.I. inquiry.
Federal
law enforcement officials had said for the past week that only
something astounding would change their conclusion that nobody should be
charged. But the mere potential for legal trouble was enough to make
Republicans gleeful, and Mr. Trump highlighted the F.B.I.’s actions in
campaign ads.
At
the end of a rocky week for Mrs. Clinton that included wild, false
speculation about looming indictments and shocking discoveries in the
emails, Mr. Comey’s letter swept away her largest and most immediate
problem.
Republicans
immediately accused Mr. Comey of making his announcement prematurely.
“Comey must be under enormous political pressure to cave like this and
announce something he can’t possibly know,” Newt Gingrich, a Trump
adviser, wrote on Twitter.
Mr.
Comey’s move is also sure to prompt questions from Democrats. Most
important among them: Why did Mr. Comey raise the specter of wrongdoing
before agents had even read the emails, especially since it took only
days to determine that they were not significant?
Just
hours before Mr. Comey sent the letter to Capitol Hill, Senate
Democrats said hearings should be held to examine how Mr. Comey had
handled the matter. After the letter’s release, Senator Dianne
Feinstein, Democrat of California, said the Justice Department “needs to
take a look at its procedures to prevent similar actions that could
influence future elections.”
“There’s no doubt that it created a false impression about the nature of the agency’s inquiry,” she added.
The
F.B.I. director’s vague, brief announcement on Oct. 28 left Mrs.
Clinton with few details to rebut and little time to do it. Many current
and former F.B.I. agents and Justice Department officials said Mr.
Comey had needlessly plunged the F.B.I. into the politics of a
presidential election, with no clear way out.
A
long list of former Justice Department officials, including Attorney
General Eric H. Holder Jr., chided Mr. Comey. Despite the fact that the
bureau did not find anything that changed its original conclusion about
Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Comey has insisted that he had no choice but to inform
Congress about the new emails because the investigation had been
completed and he had pledged transparency, according to senior F.B.I.
officials.
Because
of Mr. Comey’s Oct. 28 letter, Attorney General Loretta Lynch made
completing a review of the emails a top priority. Late last month, Mr.
Comey ordered agents to work around the clock to sift through the
messages. That process, senior F.B.I. officials said, was painstaking,
because each message that had been sent to Mrs. Clinton had to be
reviewed to determine whether it had sensitive national security
materials.
In
Mr. Comey’s short letter to Congress on Sunday, he said he was “very
grateful to the professionals at the F.B.I. for doing an extraordinary
amount of high-quality work in a short period of time.”
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