FBI Director James Comey announced Tuesday morning the agency will recommend Hillary Clinton face no criminal charges for her use of a private email account to send classified materials while secretary of state.
“Although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case," Comey said at a press conference.
The Clinton campaign expressed its satisfaction with the Department of Justice's decision to not pursue any legal action.
“As the Secretary has long said, it was a mistake to use her personal email and she would not do it again," campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement Tuesday. "We are glad that this matter is now resolved."
However, Comey did not absolve Clinton of wrongdoing completely. “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgement is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” he said.
Comey also criticized Clinton sharply from the podium.
“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," he said.
The FBI director cited past investigations as precedent when discussing the decision not to bring charges.
“In looking back at our investigations into the mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts," Comey said.
The decision was immediately criticized by businessman Donald Trump, Clinton's expected opponent in the November general election. "The system is rigged," Trump tweeted. "General Petraeus got in trouble for far less. Very very unfair! As usual, bad judgment." David Petraeus pleaded guilty last year to misdemeanor charges of mishandling classified information while he was head of the CIA.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan also voiced displeasure with the FBI Tuesday.
"While I respect the law enforcement professionals at the FBI, this announcement defies explanation," Ryan said in a statement. "No one should be above the law."
Comey defended the investigation as impartial during his press conference. “What I can assure the American people is that this investigation was done honestly, competently and independently," he said. "No outside influence of any kind was brought to bare.”
Questions were raised after a meeting last week between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Hillary Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton. Lynch expressed regret for the meeting and stressed that she would accept the FBI's recommendations, even if it meant political disaster for the administration.
Trump also responded Tuesday on Twitter to Comey's criticisms of Clinton. "FBI director said Crooked Hillary compromised our national security," he tweeted. "No charges. Wow!"
Comey cited one specific group of emails sent by Clinton and her aides as an example of inappropriate correspondence. “Any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position … should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation," he said.
The investigation also found systemic security issues at the State Department while Clinton was secretary of state.
“We also developed evidence that the security culture of the State Department, in general and with respect to the use of unclassified systems in particular, was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information that’s found elsewhere in the U.S. government," Comey said.
Indeed, the FBI director suggested at one point that private email services such as Gmail had more security than Clinton's server. “We did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal email domain … was hacked successfully," Comey said, but he acknowledged, “It is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.”
The investigation determined that 110 of the 30,000 emails Clinton turned over to the State Department after she left office contained classified material at the time they were sent or received. Eight email threads contained information considered top secret, the highest level of classification. In addition, approximately 2,000 emails contained information that was retroactively classified.
“The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related emails that were not among the group of 30,000 emails returned by Secretary Clinton to state in 2014," Comey said Tuesday. The agency found that three of those emails contained information that was classified at the time they were sent or received.
Clinton's response last August to questions over whether she "wiped" her server to delete emails after turning over some to the State Department drew criticism. "What, like, with a cloth or something?" she joked at a Las Vegas campaign event.
Comey addressed that concern Tuesday. “We found no evidence that any of the additional work-related emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them in some way," he said. “We believe our investigation has been sufficient to give us reasonable confidence there was no intentional misconduct in connection with that sorting effort.”
However, Comey did directly refute several public statements by Clinton in his remarks Tuesday.
Clinton has long maintained she followed State Department guidelines regarding email usage. "My personal email use was fully above board. It was allowed by the State Department," she said last September in an interview on MSNBC. An inspector general report from the department in May contradicted that assertion, and Comey also stated Tuesday that her conduct was unacceptable after stating no charges should be filed.
“This is not to suggest that in similar circumstances a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences," Comey said. "To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions, but that’s not what we're deciding now.”
Clinton also trotted out another common talking point in an interview Sunday, shortly after she was interviewed by the FBI as part of their investigation. "Let me just repeat what I have repeated for many months now: I never received nor sent any material that was marked classified," she said in an interview on MSNBC.
Comey took issue with that characterization Tuesday during his press conference. “Even if information is not marked classified in an email," he said, "participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it."