CNN’s Elie Honig Rejects Assertion That ‘No Reasonable Prosecutor’ Would Have Charged Hillary Clinton: ‘A Very Close Call’

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig rejected former FBI Director James Comey’s assertion that “no reasonable prosecutor” would have brought charges against Hillary Clinton in 2016, telling PBS’s Margaret Hoover that it was a “very close call” on Firing Line.

At a press conference held on July 5, 2016 after it became clear that Clinton would be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, Comey said that Clinton and her team had been “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” and that there was “evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information.”

But, he concluded, “our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

Honig told Hoover that he dissented from that conclusion.

“I don’t necessarily agree with James Comey based on what we know about the case. I don’t agree that no reasonable prosecutor would have charged Hillary Clinton,” began Honig. “I do think there are reasonable prosecutors that could have charged Hillary Clinton, I think it’s a very close call.”

Nevertheless, Honig stressed that former president Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified information, for which he has been indicted by the Department of Justice, constituted a worse offense in his opinion.

“If the question is: Well what’s the difference between the Hillary Clinton case, which is right on the razor’s edge, and the Trump case, I think it’s a couple things,” offered the former federal prosecutor. He continued:

First of all, the nature of the documents. Hillary Clinton had some documents that had classified markings, Donald Trump had over 100 documents that went to our most core national security issues. Second of all, there’s just the willful disobedience and obstruction by Donald Trump. The fact that he lied, I mean this is the second half of the indictment, that he lied to his lawyers to get them to lie to DOJ and the grand jury.

So I don’t necessarily agree that what Hillary Clinton did could not have been charged by any reasonable prosecutor, but I certainly believe that what Trump did was worse.

Honig went on to say he could “understand” the conflation of the two cases and to argue that they were “similar” but “not the same.”

Watch above via PBS.