Hillary Clinton ridicules James Comey for reportedly using his personal email for work

Hillary Clinton has ridiculed former FBI director James Comey after a government report found he used a personal email account for work.

“But my emails,” the former presidential nominee quipped, retweeting a post about the revelation by Politico reporter Kyle Cheney.

One Twitter user responded: “This is the best tweet in the history of Twitter.” Another replied: “I’m a Trump supporter but this just made me giggle quietly.”

Democrats have criticised Mr Comey’s decision to make public an investigation into Ms Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time serving as secretary of state during the Obama administration, saying the announcement derailed her presidential campaign.

The justice department’s review of the FBI’s handing of the investigation, which was published on Thursday, said: “We identified numerous instances in which Comey used a personal email account (a Gmail account) to conduct FBI business.”

The report went on to cite five examples of his alleged use of the personal server.

Mr Comey did not act with political bias in his handling of the probe into Ms Clinton, but he did deviate significantly from protocol and damaged the bureau’s reputation, the report concluded.

“Then-Director Comey chose to deviate from the FBI’s and the Department’s established procedures and norms and instead engaged in his own subjective, ad hoc decision making,” it said.

“In so doing, we found that Comey largely based his decisions on what he believed was in the FBI’s institutional interests and would enable him to continue to effectively lead the FBI as its director.

“While we did not find that these decisions were the result of political bias on Comey’s part, we nevertheless concluded that by departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice.”

The internal investigation into Mr Comey’s behaviour focuses on two instances during the 2016 campaign that may have affected the outcome of the election.

The first is a press conference the former FBI director held on July 5, 2016, in which he announced that he would not recommended any charges against Ms Clinton for her use of the private email server. He said his investigation into the matter had not identified any criminal processing of classified information on the servers – which could have included deliberate transfer of classified information on the servers, or grossly-negligent transferring of that information.

But he did say the bureau had found “evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information”.

The second incident occurred on October 28 that year, when Mr Comey sent a letter to Congress notifying the legislative body that the FBI was reviewing emails obtained on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, who was married to Ms Clinton’s close aide Huma Abedin.

Mr Weiner had been investigated in relation to allegations that he had sent sexually inappropriate photographs to a minor. The announcement that the email investigation was being renewed – or at least that some emails were being reviewed – sent a political shock wave through the 2016 election less than two weeks before election day.

Before making those announcements, the new report says, Mr Comey did not confer with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch about the nature of his disclosures, which it said was normal protocol.

“We found it extraordinary that, in advance of two such consequential decisions, the FBI Director decided that the best course of conduct was to not speak directly and substantively with the Attorney General about how best to navigate these decisions and mitigate the resulting harms, and that Comey’s decision resulted in the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General concluding that it woul d be counterproductive to speak directly with the FBI Director,” the report said.

In response to the release of the report, Mr Comey released a statement saying he did not agree with everything the inspector general had found but that he respected the institution’s work.

“I respect the DOJ IG office, which is why I urged them to do this review. The conclusions are reasonable, even though I disagree with some,” Mr Comey wrote in a tweet.

“People of good faith can see an unprecedented situation differently. I pray no Director faces it again. Thanks to IG’s people for hard work.”

The inspector general’s report recommends several changes to FBI policies, including an overhaul of guidances for speaking publicly about people who have not been charged during an FBI investigation.