Trying to avoid politics, Comey shaped election
FBI head landed in uncharted territory
WASHINGTON — The day before he upended the 2016 election, James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, summoned agents and lawyers to his conference room. They had been debating all day, and it was time for a decision.
Mr. Comey’s plan was to tell Congress that the FBI had received new evidence and was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton, the presidential frontrunner. The move would violate the policies of an agency that does not reveal its investigations or do anything that may influence an election. But Mr. Comey had declared the case closed, and he believed he was obligated to tell Congress that had changed.
“Should you consider what you’re about to do may help elect Donald Trump president?” an adviser asked him, Mr. Comey recalled recently at a closed meeting with FBI agents.
He could not let politics affect his decision, he replied. “If we ever start considering who might be affected, and in what way, by what we do, we’re done,” he told the agents.
Fearing the backlash that would come if it were revealed after the election that the FBI had been investigating the next president and had kept it a secret, Mr. Comey sent a letter informing Congress that the case was reopened.
What he did not say was that the FBI was also investigating the Trump campaign. Just weeks before, Mr. Comey had declined to answer a question from Congress about whether there was such an investigation. Only in March, long after the election, did Mr. Comey confirm that there was one.
For Mr. Comey, keeping the FBI out of politics is such a preoccupation that he once said he would never play basketball with thenPresident Barack Obama because of the appearance of being chummy with the man who appointed him. But the leader of the nation’s pre-eminent law enforcement agency shaped the contours, if not the outcome, of the presidential race by his handling of the Clinton and Trump-related investigations.
An examination by The New York Times, based on interviews with more than 30 current and former law enforcement, congressional and other government officials, found that while partisanship was not a factor in Mr. Comey’s approach to the two investigations, he handled them in starkly different ways.
In the case of Ms. Clinton, he rewrote the script, partly based on the FBI’s expectation that she would win and fearing the bureau would be accused of helping her. In the case of Mr. Trump, he conducted the investigation by the book, with the FBI’s traditional secrecy.
The Times found that this go-it-alone strategy was shaped by his distrust of senior officials at the Justice Department, who he and other FBI officials felt had provided Ms. Clinton with political cover. The distrust extended to his boss, Loretta Lynch, the attorney general, who Mr. Comey believed had subtly helped play down the Clinton investigation.
The examination also showed that at one point, Mr. Obama himself was reluctant to disclose the suspected Russian influence in the election last summer, for fear his administration would be accused of meddling.
Mr. Comey has not squarely addressed his decisions last year. He has touched on them only obliquely, asserting that the FBI is blind to partisan considerations. “We just don’t care. We can’t care,” he said at a public event recently. “We only ask: ‘What are the facts? What is the law?'”
But circumstances and choices landed him in uncharted and perhaps unwanted territory, as he made what he thought were the least damaging choices from even less desirable alternatives.
“This was unique in the history of the FBI,” said Michael Steinbach, a former senior national security official at the FBI. “People say, ‘This has never been done before.’ Well, there never was a before. Or ‘That’s not normally how you do it.’ There wasn’t anything normal about this.”