Kevin Johnson

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The FBI on Tuesday provided Republican congressional leaders a package of documents summarizing its now-closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email servers while secretary of State.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which sought the material after FBI Director James Comey recommended last month that no criminal charges be brought against the now-Democratic presidential nominee, confirmed the receipt, characterizing the material as “a number of documents related to the investigation’’ that remain classified as secret.

A committee spokesperson declined further comment.

The release of information related to a closed investigation represents a highly unusual action by the bureau in a politically charged case that continues to defy the norm.

“Consistent with our commitment to transparency with respect to the FBI’s investigation of former Secretary of State Clinton’s use of a personal email server, the FBI is providing certain relevant materials to appropriate congressional committees to assist them in their oversight responsibilities in this matter,'' the FBI said in a statement Tuesday. "The material contains classified and other sensitive information and is being provided with the expectation it will not be disseminated or disclosed without FBI concurrence.”

More than a month ago, Comey offered an extraordinary summary of the bureau’s findings on live television, describing the handling of classified information by Clinton and others as “extremely careless’’ but not worthy of a criminal prosecution.

“Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information,’’ Comey said then, “our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutors would bring such a case.’’

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Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who had earlier vowed to accept the recommendation of career prosecutors and the FBI, formally closed the yearlong inquiry that has shadowed Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The director later defended his decision in an appearance before the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee that lasted more than four hours.

"There is no way anybody would bring a case against John Doe or Hillary Clinton for the second time in 100 years based on those facts,’’ Comey told lawmakers then, referring to a review of past prosecutions.

"In looking back at our investigations into mishandling of removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts," Comey said.

Republican congressional leaders sought the FBI's notes in an attempt to support their recent call for the Justice Department to launch a new investigation, alleging that Clinton provided false testimony to Congress last year about her use of the personal email system.

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House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., have asserted that Clinton's October testimony during a review of the deadly 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, was at odds with the FBI's recent findings.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the House Intelligence Committee's ranking Democrat, had argued against the FBI release, saying that the Republican request amounted to an "abuse of the congressional investigative process.''

"I can see little legitimate purpose to which Congress will put (this) material,'' Schiff said Tuesday. "Instead, as the now-discredited Benghazi Committee demonstrated, their contents will simply be leaked for political purposes.''

Last month, while opting against recommending charges, Comey did take Clinton and State Department officials to task for their procedures in handling sensitive information.

"Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," he said in his initial summary of the case.

Comey said that, of the 30,000 or so Clinton emails provided by the State Department, 110 messages in 52 email chains were determined to have contained classified information at the time they were sent or received.

Eight of those email chains contained information that was top secret at the time they were sent or received, the FBI reported; 36 of the email chains contained secret information at the time; and eight contained lesser confidential information.

Part of the investigation dealt with whether foreign adversaries tried to hack Clinton's private email system, Comey said. In recent years, the Chinese and Russian governments are among those who have been accused of prying into American secrets.

It is possible that “hostile actors” were able to access Clinton’s personal email account, Comey said, but there was no “direct evidence."

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The director said that the yearlong inquiry was made "more complicated'' because the former secretary used several different email servers and administrators during her tenure at the State Department. The reconstruction of those networks, Comey said, was akin to making sense of a "huge jigsaw puzzle'' whose pieces had been scattered across the floor.

"The effect was that millions of email fragments end up unsorted in the server's unused or slack space,'' Comey said, describing the task as Clinton's different servers were decommissioned and software removed. "We searched through all of it to see what was there, and what parts of the puzzle could be put back together.''

Comey said the evidence supports the conclusion that "any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton's position or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation."