FBI Director to testify before Congress Thursday on recommendation not to prosecute
FBI Director James Comey will testify before the House Oversight Committee on Thursday about Hillary Clinton's use of private email servers while she served as secretary of state, the panel announced Wednesday.
Comey will testify before the committee at a 10 a.m. hearing, alongside Steve Linick, the State Department's inspector general, and Charles McCullough, III, the inspector general for the intelligence community, the panel said.
In a statement, Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, called Comey's recommendation a day earlier that Clinton should not be prosecuted for her use of private servers "surprising and confusing."
"Individuals who intentionally skirt the law must be held accountable. Congress and the American people have a right to understand the depth and breadth of the FBI's investigation. I thank Directory Comey for accepting the invitation to publicly answer these important questions," Chaffetz wrote.
His appearance before the committee will come two days before Comey said that the FBI had completed its investigation of the email servers and is referring the matter to the Justice Department.
Comey said the FBI assessed whether classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on Clinton's personal email server or whether classified information was mishandled intentionally or in a grossly negligent way -- which is a felony -- or whether people knowingly removed classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities, which is a misdemeanor. He added that the FBI also investigated whether there was computer intrusion by nation states or hostile actors.
Comey said that it would not be appropriate to bring charges in the case, which prompted blowback from Donald Trump and other top Republicans.
Comey said that the FBI found that Clinton actually used "several different servers" and administrators of those servers during her four years as secretary of state as well as "numerous mobile devices" to send and receive email on her personal domain.
When one of the servers was decommissioned in 2013, the software was removed, but millions of email fragments remained in a "slack space of the server" which the FBI had to use to piece the puzzle of her emails back together.
"We searched through all of it to understand what was there and what parts of the puzzle we could put back together again," Comey said.
From the group of approximately 30,000 emails that Clinton provided to the State Department, the FBI found 110 emails in 52 email chains that "have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received," Comey said.
Eight of those chains contained top-secret information, Comey said, 36 chains contained information that was considered secret at the time and eight were considered confidential.
