FBI head ‘mildly nauseous’ about any election impact
Comey defends revealing email matter so close to November vote
FBI Director James Comey staunchly defended his decision to publicly announce the reopening of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s private email server 11 days before the November election, telling a Senate panel on Wednesday it would have been the “death of the FBI as an institution in America” had he remained silent about possible new evidence.
Still, Comey acknowledged the possible repercussions of such a move. “It makes me mildly nauseous that we would have had an impact on the election,” Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee in his most detailed explanation yet of his controversial October action.
Comey said he had no choice but to inform lawmakers about the investigation’s developments in late October, after he learned thousands of Clinton emails had been recovered from a laptop used by former New York representative Anthony Weiner, the husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. He recalled the decision as a personal struggle to either “conceal or speak” about the rapidly unfolding developments so close to the election.
“We had to walk into a world of really bad,” Comey said. “I could not see a door labeled, ‘No action needed.’ ” He declined to respond to repeated questions from senators about whether former attorney general Loretta Lynch had sought to provide cover for Clinton during the bureau’s investigation.
Nevertheless, the director acknowledged that he “worried” about the Justice Department’s credibility to resolve the inquiry after Lynch’s impromptu June meeting with former president Bill Clinton when their planes were parked nearby at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport. So, Comey said he took it upon himself to first publicly announce the outcome of the FBI’s inquiry in July and then reopen it in October. “Her meeting with President Clinton on that airplane was the capper for me, ” Comey said.
Still, the director added, “I wouldn’t have done anything differently. I don’t have any regrets.”
Clinton has blamed Comey as recently as Tuesday for torpedoing her campaign as the Democratic presidential nominee. The FBI ultimately cleared Clinton of any wrongdoing on the weekend before the election.
Judiciary Committee Democrats, including Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, contended that the director had applied a double standard by making public remarks about the Clinton inquiry but not acknowledging the FBI’s inquiry into possible collusion between associates of President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russian officials, which had begun in July.
But Comey asserted that he handled the investigations with equal care, adding that the Trump campaign probe, a classified counterintelligence inquiry, was still in its early stages at the time he announced the closing of the Clinton inquiry in July, reopened it in October and closed it again without charges in the days before the election.
Yet Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the committee, said that “a cloud of doubt hangs over the FBI.” Grassley said the agency had provided him “inconsistent information” about the probe.
“Where is all the speculation about (Russian) collusion coming from?” Grassley asked.
Comey, in his first public testimony since acknowledging the Russia inquiry to another congressional panel in March, declined to name the targets of the inquiry and specifically refused to address whether Trump was a subject of it. “We will follow the evidence wherever it leads,” the director said.
The U.S. intelligence community has blamed Moscow for a campaign to hack Democratic political organizations and release stolen information to undermine Clinton’s campaign.