Hillary Clinton may have avoided any legal repercussions of her private email server, but she must still deal with the political consequences, according to an editorial in
The New York Times.
Although FBI Director James Comey announced that the bureau would not recommend criminal charges against the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, he called Clinton's actions
"extremely careless," a phrase which has appeared in countless headlines since.
Nevertheless, he found no clear evidence that Clinton or her staff at the State Department intentionally broke federal law, and without that, he said, "no reasonable prosecutor" would press charges.
"In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts," Comey said.
"All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here."
But Comey did find "evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton's position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation." He included emails sent from foreign locations.
"None of these emails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning because all of these emails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff," Comey said.
The Times described his words as "a censure of Mrs. Clinton's judgment." She has only conceded that using a personal email server was a mistake.
"People simply don't get indicted for accidental, non-malicious mishandling of classified material" Benjamin Wittes, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, wrote in an analysis of Comey's statement on the
Lawfare blog.
"I have never seen a criminal matter proceed without even an allegation of something more than mere mishandling of sensitive information. Hillary Clinton is not above the law, but to indict her on these facts, she'd have to be significantly below the law."
For her part, Clinton has steadfastly insisted that she did nothing illegal.
"I did not send or receive any information that was marked classified at the time," Clinton said on
ABC News last September.
According to the FBI.'s investigation, this statement is false. Clinton did send and receive classified emails, including some that were Top Secret, and this hasn't been ignored by Republicans.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was quick to lambaste the decision, tweeting:
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