Background
On March 4th, 2015, during the Select Committee on Benghazi, a subpoena was ordered on Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server. The committee would later claim on July 8th, 2015 that Hillary knowingly lied about deleting her e-mails,(Select Committee on Benghazi) since they were deleted after the subpoena was issued on them.(FBI)
United Nations press conference
On March 10th, 2015, Hillary Clinton held a press conference headquarters of the United Nations in Manhattan stating that she chose not to “keep my private personal emails,” and that she fully cooperated with the State Department.(TIME, Miller) (YouTube, @wavy [4:35])
Quote
At the end, I chose not to keep my private personal emails — emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes. No one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy. Fourth, I took the unprecedented step of asking that the State Department make all my work-related emails public for everyone to see. I am very proud of the work that I and my colleagues and our public servants at the department did during my four years as secretary of state, and I look forward to people being able to see that for themselves. Again, looking back, it would’ve been better for me to use two separate phones and two email accounts. I thought using one device would be simpler, and obviously, it hasn’t worked out that way.(TIME, Miller)
Midyear investigation
In July of 2015, the FBI opened an investigation into Secretary of State at the time Hillary Clinton dubbed the “Midyear Exam,“(DoJ p. 1) about her e-mails and more broadly her use of private servers for classified information,(DoJ p. 1) with them releasing a statement on July 25h, 2015, discussing information found about Hillary Clinton.(Office of Inspector General)
Later on July 5th, 2016, the FBI Director James Comey would release a statement about the Hillary Clinton e-mails, saying that they won’t be charging her with any crimes, but criticizing her for being “extremely careless.”(FBI) It should be noted that the original statement was going to read “gross negligence,“(THE HILL, Soloman) but they swapped out the wording to establish that they believed there was not enough evidence to charge her with a crime, which Comey would later cite a previous case as to why he didn’t want to pursue charges for “gross negligence.”(Politico, Gerstein)
Quote
“It’s been one case brought on a gross negligence theory,” Comey told the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee as Republican lawmakers pressed him on why Clinton wasn’t being prosecuted for negligence in operating a private email server that Comey said contained highly classified information.
“I know from 30 years there’s no way anybody at the Department of Justice is bringing a case against John Doe or Hillary Clinton for the second time in 100 years based on those facts,” Comey added.(Politico, Gerstein)
Despite the investigation closing, it would later be reopened in October of 2016, and on October 26th, 2016, Comey would officially announce this, despite it having a protentional impact on the upcoming election.(Atlantic, Green)