Texas Insider Report: WASHINGTON DC I almost ordered the material held until Tuesday because I knew we would take all kinds of grief for releasing it before a holiday weekend. But my judgment was that we had promised transparency and it would be game-playing to withhold it from the public just to avoid folks saying stuff about us. We dont play games so we released it Friday said FBI Director James Comey in a memo first obtained by CNN to staff Wednesday.
The FBI director has faced renewed criticism after his agency published a scathing 58-page summary of the Clinton email investigation just hours before the Labor Day weekend. But Comey stood by the timing of the reports release which came shortly
after he said agents completed their review of the material.
The report showed Clinton and her staff claimed to be unable recall few details about the private email server that resided in the former secretary of states basement during her State Department tenure.
When Congress started asking questions about the agencys lack of emails related to Benghazi Clintons staff and employees of the tech firm tapped to manage her network scrubbed official records from the server system.
FBI Director James Comey defended the work of his agents Wednesday in a memo to staff arguing the decision to spare Hillary Clinton and her aides from prosecution for their mistreatment of classified information was not a difficult one.
Dismissing former FBI agents suggestions that indictments had been scuttled for political reasons Comey said he struggled to see how anyone could take a different view of the case than the one he has put forward.
At the end of the day the case itself was not a cliff-hanger; despite all the chest-beating by people no longer in government there really wasnt a prosecutable case Comey said.
The hard part was whether to offer unprecedented transparency about our thinking.
