White House: No special prosecutor needed for Clinton email probe

By SUSAN CRABTREE (@SUSANCRABTREE) • 10/31/16 3:05 PM


White House press secretary Josh Earnest said President Obama does not support calls for a special prosecutor to take over the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server now that the probe itself has become entangled in new charges and has been politicized.

"No, the president hasn't reached that conclusion at all," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday when asked if Obama supports the appointment of an independent counsel.

"The investigation that was concluded by the Department of Justice and the FBI was a thorough one, and one that [FBI Director James] Comey has thoroughly explained," Earnest said.

Earnest added that he doesn't think anyone would conclude that Comey "somehow gave short shrift to some of the questions that were posed in the investigation" based on public statements the FBI director has made.

He stressed that the White House has had no briefings on the status of the investigation or its handling and he is only basing the opinion that the probe was conducted "free from any political interference" on Comey's public statements.

Earnest said Obama has not spoken to Attorney General Loretta Lynch about her reported opposition to Comey's decision to send a letter to Congress last week informing them that the FBI is reviewing new emails pertinent to the Clinton email case.

After Republican lawmakers made the letter public and argued that the FBI had just reopened the investigation a little more than a week before Election Day, Democrats charged Comey with politicizing the probe.

Republicans in May accused Comey of politicizing the investigation by announcing that the FBI had not found enough evidence to support a criminal indictment, despite chiding Clinton and her team for being "extremely careless" in setting up the private email server and exchanging classified material on it.

The legal bar for a criminal prosecution in cases involving the handling of classified material is "gross negligence."

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2606087/