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28th Oct 2016

FBI to re-open investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server

The news comes less than two weeks before the day of the Presidential election

Conor Heneghan

“The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is to resume an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server after learning “of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,” an investigation that had been previously completed in July of this year.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, FBI Director James B. Comey said that the FBI should take “appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to the investigation”.

The re-opening of the FBI investigation comes less than two weeks before the day of the Presidential election and follows on from the release earlier this week by Wikileaks’ of private emails sent by Clinton.

Amongst those leaked emails were conversations about using the death of Eric Garner in 2014 to protest gun violence, which were criticised by Garner’s daughter Erica on Twitter.

Clinton’s use of her private email server for official communications – including thousands of mails retroactively marked as ‘classified’ – during her spell as Secretary of State became public knowledge in March 2015 and has repeatedly been attacked by Donald Trump throughout the Presidential campaign.

The FBI concluded an initial investigation into Clinton’s use of her private email server in July of this year, following which they concluded that she was “extremely careless” but recommended that no charges be filed against her.

Paul Ryan, Republican Party member and current Speaker of the House of Representatives, had the following response to the news…