So I've been seeing a lot of complaints about Comey stepping outside his authority in not recommending charges
But didn't Lynch ask him to do exactly that? She punted to him.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch says she will accept whatever recommendations FBI investigators and career prosecutors make about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
His decision to NOT recommend prosecution, while it was the wrong decision, it seems like Lynch gave it to him to make. He was on the hook, and at that point unless he said to charge her it wasn't going to happen. Is it just that he called a press conference and talked way too much about how guilty Clinton was?
There's a difference between making a recommendation that goes up the food chain (internally),
versus calling a press conference and stating that there would be no prosecution -- on the fallacious grounds that she (Hillary) didn't "intend" to break the law. First off, there's a lot of evidence that she very much DID intend to break the law but, more important, the law she broke does not require intent. If you mishandle classified information, you're guilty. Intent is not mentioned, and lots of less important people have been charged and prosecuted for far less egregious instances of mishandling classified information.
The bottom line is in the quote: Lynch didn't delegate the final decision to Comey, she said she would accept the recommendation of the FBI (that's the agency, not just one man -- remember, a lot of agents were very pissed off that Comey curtailed the first investigation)
AND career prosecutors. Comey was a prosecutor himself. How do you think he would have reacted if, when he was a prosecutor, the FBI had blindsided him and unilaterally announced there would be no prosecution of a person who was almost certainly guilty? So, no -- he was not doing what Lynch asked him to do. He took her and the prosecutors -- who are the people who are supposed to decide whether or not to press charges -- out of the loop.
