Washington: FBI director James Comey told Congress on Monday that he had seen no evidence in a recently discovered trove of emails to change his conclusion that Hillary Clinton should face no charges over her handling of classified information.
Mr Comey’s announcement, just two days before the election, was an effort to clear the cloud of suspicion he had publicly placed over her presidential campaign late last month when he alerted Congress that the FBI would examine the emails.
“Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton,” Mr Comey wrote in a letter to the leaders of several congressional committees. He said agents had reviewed all communications to and from Ms Clinton in the new trove from when she was secretary of state.
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The letter was a dramatic final twist in a tumultuous nine days for both Ms Clinton and Mr Comey, who drew widespread criticism for announcing that the FBI had discovered new emails that might be relevant to its investigation of Ms Clinton,
which ended in July.
A senior law enforcement official said as recently as Friday, it was not clear whether the review would be completed by Election Day. But after days of working in shifts around the clock, teams of counterintelligence agents and technology specialists finished their examination of the thousands of emails. Officials had decided to make their decision public as soon as they had reached it.
— By arrangement with the New York Times
