USA: Justice Department To Investigate FBI Over Clinton Email Probe

VOA-NEWS Ken Bredemeier

The independent watchdog at the U.S. Justice Department said Thursday he is launching a probe of the agency’s handling of the investigation of Democrat Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state, one of the most contentious issues of last year’s presidential election campaign that she lost.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said he would look at how Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey conducted his year-long probe of Clinton, the top U.S. diplomat from 2009 to 2013 who was trying to become the country’s first female president.

Comey, while saying Clinton’s handling of classified material on her email server was “extremely careless,” cleared her four months ahead of the election of criminal wrongdoing. But Comey reopened the investigation in the days just ahead of the November 8 voting and then said two days before the election investigators had found nothing new.

Clinton has attributed Comey’s reopening of his investigation 11 days ahead of the official Election Day — a time when millions of voters already were casting early ballots — as a key factor in her stunning upset loss to Republican Donald Trump, the billionaire real estate mogul turned politician who next week is taking office as the country’s 45th president.

Across the U.S., Clinton won nearly 3 million more votes than Trump, but lost the election under the system the U.S. uses to pick its presidents, with state-by-state results determining the outcome in the Electoral College. Clinton won two big states, California and New York, by huge margins, to account for her edge in the national popular vote, while Trump captured several states by much narrower margins in the country’s industrial heartland to win the presidency in the Electoral College.

Clinton on numerous occasions called her use of the private email server a mistake, but she said she never knowingly sent or received classified material on the unsecured email system she used rather than a secure government computer server. But investigators found some classified material among thousands of Clinton emails.

The issue plagued Clinton’s campaign, leaving some voters to question her honesty and forthrightness in answering questions about the issue.

Despite Trump’s repeated campaign taunt describing her as “Crooked Hillary,” the Clinton campaign thought the issue was behind it with Comey’s decision in July to not pursue criminal charges.