Comey: ‘It was the right thing’

FBI Director James Comey defended the decision to reveal his agency had reopened an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server just before the November election.

WASHINGTON — FBI Director James Comey strongly defended his decision to inform Congress in late October that he had reopened an FBI investigation into Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the decision to go public 11 days before the election was “one of the world’s most painful experiences,” but that he would do it again.

“It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election, but honestly, it wouldn’t change the decision,” he said.

“It was a hard choice, and I still believe in retrospect it was the right choice,” he said.

Comey sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28 saying the FBI had recovered thousands of emails in an unrelated probe and was reopening its investigation into whether Clinton may have mishandled classified information.

Although the FBI disclosed a week later that the investigation had found no wrongdoing by Clinton, and that no charges were warranted, Clinton and her supporters have blamed Comey’s disclosure for tilting the election in Donald Trump’s favor.

“If the election had been on Oct. 27, I would be your president,” Clinton said in a TV interview Tuesday. She said that Comey’s letter, Russian hacking of Democratic emails and her own flaws as a candidate contributed to her loss.

Comey said Wednesday that FBI agents had found emails on a laptop computer used by Anthony Weiner, the husband of a top Clinton aide, and thought they might include some missing emails from Clinton’s first months at the State Department.

Comey said he and his top staff debated whether to go public, mindful of long-standing Justice Department policies that seek to avoid actions that could sway elections.

Breaking that policy would be “really bad,” Comey said. But he said the only other choice, “concealment,” would have been “catastrophic.”

“We’ve got to walk into the world of really bad,” he said he concluded. “We’ve got to tell Congress we are restarting this.”

TOM WILLIAMS/CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY FBI Director James Comey is sworn in during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Dirksen Building titled “Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” on Wednesday in Washington, D.C.