This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on July 6, 2016 FBI Dir­ect­or James Comey’s an­nounce­ment Tues­day morn­ing that Hil­lary Clin­ton will not be in­dicted ef­fect­ively re­moves one of the last im­port­ant vari­ables in this pres­id­en­tial elec­tion—at least any that we know about. Comey’s rather re­mark­able 15-minute, na­tion­ally tele­vised state­ment care­fully re­viewed the FBI’s year-long in­vest­ig­a­tion in­to al­leg­a­tions that clas­si­fied ma­ter­i­al was trans­mit­ted through Clin­ton’s per­son­al email serv­er while she was sec­ret­ary of State, in vi­ol­a­tion of fed­er­al stat­utes. Comey’s state­ment was far more scath­ing than ex­culp­at­ory, but it told us little that we didn’t know already. The most im­port­ant new nug­get may well have been that Clin­ton used her Black­berry while trav­el­ling in coun­tries where there would be a reas­on­able ex­pect­a­tion of at­tempts to in­ter­cept her com­mu­nic­a­tions, po­ten­tially in­clud­ing clas­si­fied in­form­a­tion. Comey con­firmed that Clin­ton and her staff were guilty of hor­rendous judg­ment and were “ex­tremely care­less” in hav­ing all of her of­fi­cial email routed through an un­se­cured device and sys­tem. In­deed, the crit­ic­al ques­tion in my mind, and this is not one that would have been ap­pro­pri­ate for

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