FBI recommends no criminal charges for 'extremely careless' Hillary Clinton

The FBI will not recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server while US secretary of state, the agency’s director James Comey has said.

But Mr Comey called Mrs Clinton’s actions “extremely careless” and faulted the agency she led for an overly relaxed approach to handling classified material.

"Extremely careless."

FBI Director Comey won't recommend charges against Hillary Clinton over emails. #ClintonEmailhttps://t.co/dtAJ0qfrNl

— Splinter is on Bluesky (@splinter_news) July 5, 2016

Mr Comey’s decision almost certainly brings the legal part of the issue to a close and removes the threat of criminal charges against Mrs Clinton.

Attorney general Loretta Lynch said last week that she would accept the recommendations of the FBI director and of career prosecutors.

“No charges are appropriate in this case,” Mr Comey said in making his announcement.

But Mr Comey made that statement after he delivered a blistering review of Mrs Clinton’s actions, saying the FBI found that 110 emails were sent or received on her server containing classified information.

He added it was possible that people hostile to the US had gained access to her personal email account.

He said: “Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

But after criticising Mrs Clinton, her aides and the department for their actions, he said that after looking at similar circumstances in past inquiries, the FBI believed that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case”.

Mr Comey made the announcement three days after the FBI interviewed Mrs Clinton in a final step of its year-long investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information.

He said he shared the FBI’s findings with no one else in the government before making his announcement, which came just hours before Mrs Clinton was to travel with US president Barack Obama on Air Force One to campaign together for the first time this year.

The declaration from Mr Comey is unlikely to wipe away many voters’ concerns about Mrs Clinton’s trustworthiness, especially since the FBI director so thoroughly criticised her actions before delivering his verdict.

“There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position ... should have known that an unclassified system was no place (for sensitive conversations),” Mr Comey said.

Mrs Clinton’s personal email server, which she relied on exclusively for government and personal business, has dogged her campaign since it came to light in March 2015.

She has repeatedly said that no email she sent or received was marked classified, but the Justice Department began investigating last summer following a referral from the inspector general for the State Department and the intelligence community.