The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has announced it is reopening an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
FBI chief James Comey made the announcement Friday, less than two weeks before the presidential election.
The investigation concerns the Democratic presidential candidate’s handling of email while she served as secretary of state.
Comey sent a letter to several Republican congressional leaders. It said the agency has learned of emails that appear to be important to the investigation. He said investigators will examine them to learn if they have secret information in them and if they are important to the agency’s investigation.
Comey said he could not predict how long it will take to complete the investigation.
Clinton led the State Department during the first term of President Barack Obama. A State Department official told VOA that “nobody knew this was coming.”
Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan called the development “long overdue.”
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told supporters Friday that he was happy about the news. He said he is glad the FBI will, in his words, “right the horrible mistake” it made in ending an earlier investigation into the emails.
The FBI began an investigation into the emails in 2015. In July, the agency said there was no reason to charge Clinton. But Comey did say Clinton and her aides were, in his words, “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
I’m Kelly Jean Kelly.
VOANews reported this story from Washington. Christopher Jones-Cruise adapted it for Learning English. Mario Ritter and Caty Weaver were the editors.
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Words in This Story
server – n. the main computer in a network which provides files and services that are used by the other computers