Senate hearing:
FBI Director James Comey weathers repeated questions about how he handled investigations before election day.
WASHINGTON — Under fire from Democrats, FBI Director James Comey insisted during repeated questions Wednesday he was consistent in disclosing information about an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails before election day while keeping quiet about a probe into possible contacts between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign.
Comey, in his most impassioned public defense of how he handled the case, also said it made him feel “mildly nauseous” to think his actions in October might have influenced the race won by Republican Trump over Democrat Clinton. But he told the Senate Judiciary Committee the FBI cannot take into account how its actions 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 it.”
Persistent questions from senators, and Comey’s testimony, made clear that the FBI director’s decisions of last summer and fall involving both the Trump and Clinton campaigns continue to roil national politics and produce lingering secondguessing about whether the investigations were 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.
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., 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 was unorthodox to alert Congress to that discovery 11 days before Americans picked a new president. But he said he decided it would have been “catastrophic” to keep silent, especially when he had testified under oath that the investigation had been concluded and had promised to advise lawmakers if the probe needed to be reopened.
“I sat there that morning and could not see a door labeled, ‘No action here,’ ” Comey said.
The FBI began a counterintelligence investigation last July into whether Russia had coordinated with Trump campaign associates to influence the American election, but Comey did not disclose that until a hearing in March, after Trump had been elected and taken office.
That prompted Democrats to complain of a double-standard in the way the investigations were treated.