Hillary Clinton’s Tweet About James Comey's Personal Email Usage Is Too Good
I love a good tweet, and Hillary Clinton's latest message is one for the books. Clinton took to Twitter on Thursday, June 14 to respond to a claim by the inspector general (IG) report that said James Comey used a personal email account for FBI business. Yup, a "personal email account." You could say it's a little funny, seeing that Comey was a lead investigator into the probe of Clinton's private email usage while she was Secretary of State. Well, it looks like she picked up the irony, because Hillary Clinton's tweet about James Comey's personal email usage is almost too good.
Her tweet quoted Kyle Cheney, a Congressional reporter from Politico. Cheney's tweet said, "IG found that on numerous occasions, COMEY used a personal GMail account to conduct official FBI business, according to source briefed on the report." Clinton's message in the tweet was short, sweet, and a little bit snarky. She wrote, "But my emails."
Unless you lived under a rock during the 2016 presidential election, you probably know that Clinton's email usage drew a lot of attention to the candidate at the time. Since then, liberals have poked fun at the widespread obsession with Clinton's emails, and her tweet puts the cherry on top of the ongoing joke.
So, what's the deal with Comey's emails, anyway? Let's just say he had some explaining to do to regarding the IG report that was released on Thursday, June 14. According to CNBC, the report said, "We identified numerous instances in which Comey used a personal email account (a Gmail account) to conduct FBI business." The report found five instances where Comey used his Gmail account for business, ranging from November 2016 to January 2017. Oh my.
Apparently, Comey responded to the IG report's claim that he used personal email accounts. He said that his usage was "incidental," and that "I was making sure that the work got forwarded to the government account, to either my account," or to James Rybicki, his chief of staff. Per CNBC, Comey also told the report that he wasn't concerned about "conducting FBI business on his personal laptop or personal email." Apparently, he wasn't doing classified work there.
Still, Clinton is like:
CNBC reports Comey's further explanation to his personal email usage. Apparently, he told the IG office that he "did not have an unclass[ified] FBI connection at home that worked." He continued, saying, "And I didn't bother to fix it, whole 'nother story, but I would either use my BlackBerry, must have been or Samsung...my phone, I had two phones—a personal phone and a government phone."
Furthermore, Comey told the IG report that he would use his personal laptop for "word processing" for unclassified long drafts before sending his emails to Rybicki and copying himself. These actions relating to personal email usage have been named "inconsistent" with the Department of Justice Policy (DOJ) Statement. Yikes.
So what is the IG report, anyway? If it's going to spark some political conversation this weekend, you should probably know a thing or two about it. For starters, the report is a result of a year-long investigation by Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department's inspector general. Horowitz serves as an internal watchdog for the agency, and began an investigation on the FBI's practices in 2016 relating to Hillary Clinton's email usage of a private email server. The investigation also explored possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election. The result is a 568-page inspector general report by the U.S. Department of Justice.
If you have some (or, a lot) of time on your hands, go ahead and read it. If you'd rather a short summary about Comey's personal email usage, see Clinton's tweet.
