This is why you shouldn't just listen to a media site with an agenda and trust their claim. He didn't say that Clinton got off the hook, or that others would be punished by the FBI where Clinton wasn't.

What he said (and you can find it in the official statement, here) is "To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now."

What he's saying is that the things that Clinton did, and shouldn't have done, don't fall under FBI jurisdiction. She hasn't broken laws, she hasn't done something that she can be indicted for. If someone else did the same things, and the FBI were told to investigate, they would not charge them, either.

But what she did *could* be subject to various sanctions by the government, if they determined such sanctions to be appropriate. And similarly, an individual who does these things *could* have their security clearance downgraded, to ensure that they don't have access to confidential/classified information.

In other words, the FBI did exactly what they were supposed to do - they investigated whether Clinton had broken laws, found that no such laws were broken, and made a statement to that extent.

I lay the blame on the current state of government IT infrastructure mostly on the congress.  They are the ones who pass the budget.  

That is not the say that I think Hillary doesn't make bad decisions.  If she had wanted to follow procedure and use a 'secure' and sanctioned State Department server for her emails then it would have been done and we wouldn't be dealing with this stupid side show.  Instead she decided to be selfish and careless.  Also, plenty of people who _should_ have told her no, did not.

Someone please tell me this post is a joke.

Its probably good that a person have their major screw up before getting into office then during their time in office.  Pretty much every president makes small to large mistake no matter how popular they are viewed.  I believe this one counts as a learning situation for the goverment more than just HC.  As has been mentioned many times, this incident is not isolated to just HC, this has been going on for quite some time with goverment officials.

The original quote is basically saying more in the light of "she should receive sanctions and they decided not to" than "this kind of thing could or could not end in sanction"

So your interpretation is moving from the guilty to not guilty

Erm... did you even READ the quote? "But that is not what we are deciding now". That's literally what they said. They said that someone who did what Clinton and her team did might be subject to administrative or security sanctions, but that's not what the FBI was judging.

Notice that the next step was the State Department reopening their investigation? Because administrative and security sanctions are the jurisdiction of the State Department, not the FBI.

This is literally exactly how this should have gone - she didn't break laws, so the FBI don't recommend the DoJ press charges, but her actions were certainly questionable, so the State Department is going to take the information the FBI gathered.

But hey, you've decided she's guilty of some vague, undefined crime, therefore me pointing out what they literally said must be me "interpreting" it "from guilty to not guilty", right?

Actually, the whole point is that they *were* deciding the judicial situation. She didn't break laws - that's what they found, that's what they decided.

If their intent was to protect her in any way, or to prevent negative consequences for what she did, then the FBI failed miserably, since they spelt out exactly what she did wrong, and what should be done about it. They were practically instructing the State Department to return to their investigation, although they have no authority over such issues.

Or do you believe that they spent the time to detail the big issues in order to attract criticism for the decision they made? Are they trying to sabotage their own announcement?

I'm not sure how you read it the way that you did, but the language was quite clear, even out of context. In context, there was no doubt - the "that" refers to "administrative and security sanctions", and such sanctions aren't within the purview of the FBI. Instead, they're in the purview of the department in question - in this case, the State Department. Hence, the State Department reopening the investigation. The FBI's comments were damning; they aren't the words one would use when trying to protect Clinton.