After Strzok firing, Trump says Clinton investigation should be 'redone'

In tweets celebrating news that FBI agent Peter Strzok was fired from the FBI Monday, President Donald Trump called for the reopening of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, declaring the original investigation led by Strzok a "total fraud."

Strzok was one of the lead agents in the criminal investigation into whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton violated federal law by storing classified information on a private email server. The FBI under Comey declined to prosecute Clinton for any possible violations of the Espionage Act. In Comey's statement, he said Clinton had acted with "extreme carelessness."

An earlier draft of Comey's statement used stronger language, saying Clinton had been "grossly negligent" — a term that would have carried legal meaning under the Espionage Act. In July 2018 congressional testimony, Strzok admitted that metadata shows that Comey's statement was edited in June 2016 on his computer, but he claimed he cannot remember making the edit.

"My recollection is of working on the draft with a group of us in my office because it was the largest office and taking the inputs of probably five or ten different people," Strzok testified. He said that Comey "ultimately...made the decision to change that wording" after a "legal discussion of the use of that term."

The Espionage Act states that if an individual "through gross negligence" permits classified information "to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed" he or she "shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both."

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