Gowdy: FBI Never Investigated Clinton Sufficiently

FBI Director James Comey cited Hillary Clinton’s intentions as the main reason he would not recommend charging her for mishandling classified information on a private email server, but according to Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, Comey never so much as asked her about those intentions during the investigation.

“I didn’t see any questions on the issue of intent,” Gowdy said on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” on August 24. “There’s no question she handled them negligently or extremely carelessly. [Comey] said he didn’t go forward with charges because she didn’t have specific criminal intent. I didn’t see any questions on that — she said she did it for convenience but I didn’t see the follow-up questions in the interview I read.”

When asked what questions he would have asked to determine intent, Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor, said that he would look for both circumstantial and direct evidence. He would start by asking:

“Madam Secretary, why did you set up the email server this way? Why did you not take a state.gov email address?” And her reply was, and it always has been, convenience. And then that’s when you press and say, “What could be more convenient than just doing a state.gov email address? The labyrinthine effort that you made to create this separate server, that’s what’s inconvenient.” I would then ask, “Why did you delete emails that you kept for a year and a half?”

Gowdy also said that he did not know whether Clinton considered her emails regarding the Clinton Foundation to be personal or work-related but suspects that she used the powerful cyber tool called “BleachBit” on them along with the “yoga and wedding plans.”

“So if she considered them to be personal, then we move into the facet where she and her lawyers had those emails deleted,” He said. “And they didn’t just push the delete button. They had them deleted where even God can’t read them.”

A new batch of emails is expected to be released within the next few weeks, after a judge ordered the State Department on August 25 to release thousands of emails recovered by the FBI that Clinton had not handed over to them, reports Reuters. These emails, along with any between Clinton and the White House during the week of the 2012 Benghazi attacks, are expected to be released, per the court order, before September 13.

Sources: Fox News Insider, Reuters via CNBC / Photo credit: Trey Gowdy/Facebook