FBI director defends role in U.S. election
Says he faced a choice between ‘really bad’ and ‘catastrophic’ options re: Clinton email
WASHINGTON — FBI Director James Comey told the U.S. Congress Wednesday that revealing the reopening of the Hillary Clinton email probe just before Election Day came down to a painful, complicated choice between “really bad” and “catastrophic” options. He said he had felt “slightly nauseous” to think he might have tipped the election outcome, but in hindsight would change nothing.
“I would make the same decision,” Comey declared during a lengthy hearing in which Democratic senators grilled him on the seeming inconsistency between the Clinton disclosure 11 days before the election and his silence about the bureau’s investigation into possible contacts between Russia and Trump’s campaign.
Comey, offering an impassioned public defence of how he handled the election-year issues, insisted that the FBI’s actions in both investigations were consistent. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the FBI cannot take into account how it might benefit or harm politicians.
“I can’t consider for a second whose political futures will be affected and in what way,” Comey told the senators. “We have to ask ourselves what is the right thing to do and then do that thing.”
Questions from senators, and Comey’s testimony, made clear that his decisions of last summer and fall involving both the Trump and Clinton campaigns continue to roil national politics.
On Tuesday, Clinton attributed her loss partly to Comey’s disclosure to Congress less than two weeks before Election Day that the email investigation would be revisited. Trump disagreed, tweeting that Comey actually “was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds!”
Wednesday’s hearing yielded Comey’s most extensive explanation by far for the decisionmaking process, including his unusual July 2016 news conference in which he announced the FBI’s decision not to recommend charges for Clinton and his notification to Congress months later.
Speaking at times with a raised voice, Comey said he faced two difficult decisions when agents told him in October that they had found emails potentially connected to the Clinton case on a laptop belonging to former Representative Anthony Weiner, a Democrat from New York, who separated last year from top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Weiner’s laptop was seized as part of a sexting investigation involving a teenage girl.
Comey said he knew it would be unorthodox to alert Congress to that discovery 11 days before Americans picked a new president. But while that option was “really bad,” he said he figured it would be worse to hide the discovery from lawmakers, especially when he had testified under oath that the investigation had been concluded and had promised to advise lawmakers if it needed to be reopened.
He also denied that he had treated disclosures about investigations into Clinton’s emails differently than potential connections between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The FBI began that counterintelligence investigation in late July, but he did not disclose that until a hearing in March, after Trump had been elected and taken office.