A number of things had gone on which I can't talk about yet, that made me worry that the department leadership could not credibly complete the investigation and decline prosecution without grievous damage to the American people's confidence in the justice system, and then the capper was -- and I'm not picking on the attorney general, Loretta Lynch, who I like very much -- but her meeting with President Clinton on that airplane was the capper for me, and I then said, you know what, the department cannot, by itself, credibly end this.

James Comey

Categorized in : Top News

There are those who've been hacked by the Chinese and those who don't know they've been hacked by the Chinese.

James Comey

hacked chinese knows

I believe that Americans should be deeply skeptical of government power. You cannot trust people in power. The founders knew that. That's why they divided power among three branches, to set interest against interest.

James Comey

interest believe people

The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014... I should add here that we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.

James Comey

effort mail add

There are two things that matter in a criminal investigation of a subject.What did the person do, and when they did that thing, what were they thinking? When you look at the hundred-years-plus of the Justice Department investigation and prosecution of mishandling of classified information, those two questions are obviously present.

James Comey

two years thinking

The more able we are to keep guns out the hand so criminals and spouse abusers all - the better. So the more information we have the better for law enforcement perspective.

James Comey

law-enforcement perspective gun

I'm in the business where I can't ever say there's no risk associated with someone.

James Comey

risk i-can

Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked 'classified' in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.

James Comey

information mail numbers

Our process inside the United States government has gotten much better at making sure we touch all possible source of information about a refugee. The interview process has gotten more robust, so we've gotten our act together in that respect. The challenge remains, especially with respect to folks coming from Syria, we're unlikely to have anything in our holdings. That is, with people coming from Iraq, the United States government was there for a very long period of time. We had biometrics, we had source information. We're unlikely to have that kind of picture about someone coming from Syria.

James Comey

iraq government long

We have no basis to conclude she [Hillary Clinton] lied to the FBI.

James Comey

fbi lied clinton

In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn't do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do. That's what people do. And that should truly frighten us.

James Comey

evil mind people

Really bad people around the world, because of the genius of American innovation, use our products and infrastructure for their emails, for their communications.

James Comey

innovation communication people

WikiLeaks is a important focus of our attention.

James Comey

focus important attention

We're conducting an investigation to understand whether there was any coordination between the Russian efforts and anybody associated with the Trump campaign.

James Comey

effort

Our focus is and should be on the leakers, not those that are obtaining it as part of legitimate newsgathering.

James Comey

focus

In my view, a huge portion of WikiLeaks's activities has nothing to do with legitimate newsgathering, informing the public, commenting on important public controversies, but is simply about releasing classified information to damage the United States of America.

James Comey

controversy important

We did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. But, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence.

James Comey

mail actors would-be

We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Hillary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.

James Comey

email actors people

Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

James Comey

sensitive information law

Secretary Hillary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department. She also used numerous mobile devices to send and to read email on that personal domain.

James Comey

email different years

The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related e-mails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total e-mails remaining on Secretary Clinton’s personal system in 2014.

James Comey

information mail trying