The Justice Department investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server continues to haunt the former secretary of state and shows no sign of ending.
"We want to do it well and we want to do it promptly," FBI Director James Comey recently told reporters. "As between the two things, we will always choose 'well.'"
The Justice Department took over the probe of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's email system from the State Department almost a year ago, and in that time it has received over 55,000 pages of email messages that passed through the system.
Recently, another 160 that were previously undisclosed were discovered, many by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, reports
The Washington Post.
"I have just realized I have no idea how my papers are treated at State. Who manages both my personal and official files?" reads one email from March 2009. Clinton sent the note to two members of her staff, including former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, who currently serves as vice chairwoman of Clinton's presidential campaign.
According to
The New York Times, Abedin has testified that she had assumed, since most government-related emails were forwarded from her State Department account, that there would therefore be a copy of any exchange in government records.
But Abedin, a close personal assistant to Clinton before she joined the State Department, also had an email account on Clinton's personal server.
"Honestly, I wish I thought about it at the time," Abedin said. "As I said, I wasn't perfect. I tried to do all of my work on state.gov. And I do believe I did the majority of my work on state.gov."
Clinton, who recently weathered a GOP-led congressional investigation into the deadly attack on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, has yet to be interviewed by investigators over her private email system. The system was run on a server located for a time in the basement of a Clinton home in suburban New York, raising questions about its security.
"I think that [federal prosecutors] would want to get all their ducks in a row," New York Law School professor Douglas Cox explained to
The Hill.
"They would want to make sure that their decision was as insulated as it could be from any charges that a decision not to bring charges would be politically motivated or be driven by political considerations."
Steven Levin, a former federal prosecutor, predicted: "If the FBI concludes that Clinton did not engage in any criminal conduct," he told The Hill, "I anticipate that we will know about those findings before the election, to remove the cloud."
"If the FBI were to identify criminal conduct, such a disclosure would affect the election, something that the Department of Justice has a policy against doing," Levin continued. "So I think we should expect to see something of that nature post-election."
Not all agree though. The Hill reports that several lawyers say that if the FBI were to find evidence of criminal conduct and withhold that information until after the election, they could face having to indict the president-elect, a much more significant issue.
If the Justice Department does find that Clinton broke the law, it may be better to announce that before the Democratic National Convention, which some see as their unofficial deadline and suggest that it would lead to Clinton bowing out of the race and throwing her support to another candidate.
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