Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Comey defends pre-vote choices
Disclosed FBI probe of Clinton, would do it again, he says
WASHINGTON — FBI Director James Comey told Congress on Wednesday that disclosing the reopening of the Hillary Clinton email investigation just before Election Day came down to a painful, complicated choice between “really bad” and “catastrophic.”
He said he feels “mildly nauseous” to think that he might have tipped the election outcome but that 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 President Donald Trump’s campaign.
Comey, offering an impassioned public defense 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.”
Senators in the hearing revived lingering questions over the FBI’s actions last summer and fall, and whether the agency’s investigations had been handled evenly.
On Tuesday, Clinton partly attributed her loss 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 yet for his decision-making, including his July 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 Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y. Weiner separated last year from his wife, Huma Abedin, who was a top Clinton aide. 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’d 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.
Plus, he said, his agents weren’t optimistic that they could finish reviewing the thousands of emails on the laptop before the election and could not rule out that they would find evidence of “bad intent.”
“Concealing, in my view, would be catastrophic, not just to the FBI, but well beyond,” Comey said, explaining his options. “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, not in some frivolous way, in a hugely significant way.”
The FBI obtained a warrant to search the laptop and sifted thousands of emails, Comey said, including ones with classified information that had been forwarded to the laptop by Abedin to be printed out. Though officials found many new emails, officials again found insufficient evidence that anyone had intended to break the law, Comey said.
He also said he had not intended to harm the Clinton campaign with his public announcement in July that Clinton and her aides had been “extremely careless” in their handling of classified information, although there was not evidence to support criminal charges.
He said he had been concerned for months about how to publicly report the investigation’s findings, and because of Justice Department actions including an impromptu airplane meeting between Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, he had concluded that he needed to make the announcement himself.
“My goal was to say what is true. What did we do, what did we find, what do we think? And I tried to be as complete and fair” as possible, Comey said.
The opening statements from the top Republican and the top Democrat on the committee made clear that they wanted answers from Comey on a number of issues, including Clinton’s emails, the Russia investigation, leaks to the news media and the use of wiretapping as an investigative tool.
“We need the FBI to be accountable because we need the FBI to be effective,” said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the committee.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking Democrat on the panel, said Comey took an enormous gamble in
sending a letter to Congress on Oct. 28 — days before the Nov. 8 election — informing lawmakers that the FBI was examining new Clinton-related emails without knowing how the messages might shape the Clinton investigation.
“We need to hear how the FBI will regain that faith and trust,” Feinstein said. “We need straightforward answers to our questions, and we want to hear how you’re going to lead the FBI going forward. We never, ever want anything like this to happen again.”
She demanded to know why he treated the investigations so “dramatically different.”
Comey rejected that assertion.
He said the FBI had confirmed the existence of an investigation into Clinton’s emails months after the bureau began it, and that it said no more until after the inquiry was closed.
Similarly, Comey said, the FBI revealed that there was an investigation into Russian efforts to influence the election months after the inquiry was opened in July, and only after it had been widely reported in the media. And as in the Clinton investigation, the FBI has refused to talk about what it has found.
Comey was also pressed Wednesday about leaks to journalists and whether FBI agents in New York revealed information during the election to former federal law enforcement and elected officials, including Rudy Giuliani, the onetime New York City mayor. Three days before Comey’s announcement in October, Giuliani, an adviser to Trump’s campaign, said on Fox News that the campaign had “a couple of surprises” in store.
After Comey’s letter was made public, putting Giuliani’s comments in a new light, a Trump campaign spokesman said the former mayor had been simply “having fun.” But Giuliani later undermined that assertion,
saying he knew in advance that the FBI had found new emails related to Clinton. His comments reinforced suspicions that some FBI agents were out to get her.
“If I find out that people were leaking information about our investigations, whether to reporters or private parties, there will be severe consequences,” Comey told the questioner, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.