DOJ to rip Comey’s Hill e-mail ‘delay’

Top FBI off icials — including former director James Comey — will be criticized in an upcoming report from the Justice Department’s internal watchdog for failing to quickly review a trove of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails discovered in the last months of the 2016 election, a report on Monday said.

The DOJ inspector general will say that leading FBI off i - cials knew about the e-mails on former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s laptop in September 2016 but didn’t get a warrant to review them until the next month, The Associated Press reported.

Comey will be faulted in the report for not moving fast enough to examine the e-mails and for taking too long to get the warrant, the AP said.

The timing of Comey’s announcement that the FBI was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s e-mails came two weeks before the November 2016 election. Clinton supporters charge the delay contributed to her defeat because voters had l i tt l e time to digest the news.

Comey cleared Clinton two days before the election. By then, Clinton’s team believes, the damage had been done.

In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2017, Comey explained how he came to the decision to reopen the Clinton probe, saying he was caught between “speak and conceal.”

“Speak would be really bad. There’s an election in 11 days, Lordy, that would be really bad,” he told the senators.

“Concealing in my view would be catastrophic . . . And honestly, as between really bad and catastrophic, I said to my team, ‘ We got to walk into the world of really bad.’ I’ve got to tell Congress that we’re restarting this.”

The inspector general’s investigation into the FBI’s handling of the Clinton e-mails began in January 2017.