The result, according to Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, was so damaging that “the FBI is unlikely to regain public and congressional trust until it has a Director who understands the gravity of the mistakes and pledges never to repeat them.”
So why did Comey do it?
In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on March 3, 2017, Comey testified that he saw only two choices: “speak” or “conceal.” But as Rosenstein noted in his memo, “ ‘Conceal’ is a loaded term that misstates the issue. When federal agents quietly open a criminal investigation, we are not concealing anything; we are simply following the long-standing policy that we refrain from publicizing nonpublic information. In that context, silence is not concealment.”
I can’t know what was in Comey’s head. I don’t know if he had anything against me personally, or if he thought I was going to win the election and worried that if he didn’t speak out he’d later be attacked by Republicans or his own agents. What I do know, though, is that when you’re the head of an agency as important as the FBI, you have to care a lot more about how things really are than how they look, and you have to be willing to take the heat that goes along with the big job.
Whatever Comey was feeling or fearing, there is reason to be concerned about what was going on inside the FBI.
There’s a revolution going on inside the FBI, and it’s now at a boiling point.
According to Rudy and others with close ties to the FBI, there was a vocal faction within the bureau that was livid that, in their view, Comey had “let me off the hook” in July. “The agents are furious,” Jim Kallstrom, the former head of the FBI’s New York office and a close ally of the ex–New York Mayor, told the press. Kallstrom also endorsed Trump and described me as a “pathological liar” and member of “a crime family.” Kallstrom claimed to be in touch with hundreds of FBI agents, both retired and current. “The FBI is Trumpland,” is how another agent put it. The agent said I was regarded by some as “the Antichrist personified.” The New York Post reported that “FBI agents are ready to revolt.”
There was a rash of leaks designed to damage my campaign, including the quickly debunked false claim that indictments were coming relating to the Clinton Foundation.
Then Rudy, one of Trump’s top surrogates, went on Fox News on October 26 and promised “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next two days.” It was just two days later that Comey sent his letter.
On November 4 Rudy was back on Fox News and confirmed that he had advance warning. “Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it,” he said. At the same time, he tried to backpedal on his statement.
Several months later, Comey was questioned about this in that same Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
“Did anybody in the FBI during this 2016 campaign have contact with Rudy Giuliani about the Clinton investigation?” asked Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont. Comey said it was “a matter the FBI is looking into” and that he was “very, very interested” to learn the truth. “I don’t know yet, but if I find out that people were leaking information about our investigations whether to reporters or private parties, there will be severe consequences,” Comey said. This is a crucial question that must be answered. Comey owes it to the American people to say whether anyone at the FBI inappropriately provided Giuliani, Kallstrom, or anyone else with information. The bureau’s new leaders and the Justice Department Inspector General have a responsibility to investigate this matter fully and ensure accountability.
It’s galling that Comey took pains during the same period to avoid saying anything at all about the investigation into possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. This double standard has still never been explained adequately and it leaves me astonished.
The final week of the 2016 campaign was dominated by swirling questions about my emails and talk that the prayers of Trump supporters might finally be answered, and I’d somehow wind up in prison.
After nine days of turmoil—nine days in which millions of Americans went to the polls to vote early—and just thirty-six hours before Election Day, Comey sent another letter announcing that the “new” batch of emails wasn’t really new and contained nothing to cause him to alter his months-old decision not to seek charges.
Well, great. Too little, too late. The rest is history.
There is one more angle worth considering before I turn the page on this sordid chapter: the role of the press.
The ongoing normalization of Trump is the most disorienting development of the presidential campaign, but the most significant may be the abnormalization of Clinton.
“Abnormalization” is a pretty good description of how it felt to live through the maelstrom of the email controversy. According to Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, over the entire election, negative reports about me swamped positive coverage by 62 percent to 38 percent. For Trump, however, it was a more balanced 56 percent negative to 44 percent positive.
Coverage of my emails crowded out virtually everything else my campaign said or did. The press acted like it was the only story that mattered. To take just one egregious example, by September 2015, the then Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza had already written at least fifty pieces about my emails. A year later, the Post editorial board realized the story was out of control. “Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of… a minor email scandal,” they wrote in a September 2016 editorial.
No need to imagine. It happened.
The Post went on: “There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.”
That was one of many editorials and endorsements that got it right. I was glad to be endorsed by nearly every newspaper in the country, including some that hadn’t backed a Democrat in decades, if ever. Unfortunately, I don’t think many undecided voters read editorials, and they almost never influence broadcast or cable news. It’s the political stories on the front page that get read and picked up on TV. So even though some journalists and editors came to regret losing perspective and overdoing the coverage of my emails—and after the election, a few even shared their remorse in confidence—the damage was irreparable.
Considered alongside the real challenges that will occupy the next President, that email server, which has consumed so much of this campaign, looks like a matter for the help desk.
The Times, as usual, played an outsized role in shaping the coverage of my emails throughout the election. To me, the paper’s approach felt schizophrenic. It spent nearly two years beating me up about emails, but its glowing endorsement applied some sanity to the controversy. Then, in the homestretch of the race, when it mattered most, the paper went right back to its old ways.
First, it devoted the entire top half of its front page to Comey’s October 28 letter, even though there was zero evidence of any wrongdoing and very few facts of any kind, and continued to give it breathless coverage for the rest of the week. Then, on October 31, the Times ran one of the single worst stories of the entire election, claiming the FBI saw no link between the Trump campaign and Russia. The truth was that a very serious counterintelligence investigation was picking up steam. The paper must have been sold a bill of goods by sources trying to protect Trump. It should have known better than to publish it days before the election. In both cases, it seemed as if speculation and sensationalism trumped sound journalism.