Comey defends reopening Clinton email investigation days before election
WASHINGTON- FBI Director James Comey defended his decision to reopen the Clinton email investigation less than two weeks before last year’s presidential election.
“It makes me mildly neausous to think that we might have had some impact on the election but honestly it wouldn’t change the decision,” Comey said in response to a question from the Ranking Democrat on Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday
“Everybody that disagrees with me has to go back to October 28 with me and stare at this and tell me what you would do. Would you speak or would you conceal?” he asked.
Eleven days before the 2016 presidential election, Comey sent a letter to several Congressional committees announcing that the FBI was re-opening the Clinton email investigation after having discovered more than 600,000 emails of interest on the computer of former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner.
Weiner was married to senior Clinton advisor Huma Abedin. The couple has since separated.
The FBI discovered the emails while investigating allegations that Weiner had been sexting with a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina.
Comey explained that the discovered emails reaffirmed his prior decision not to charge Clinton for having sent and received classified information on a private server and that that was why he announced that the Clinton investigation was officially closed two days before the election.
Many Democrats have blamed Comey for Clinton’s defeat at the hands of President Donald Trump.
This article is republished with permission from Talk Media News
Bryan is an award-winning political journalist who has extensive experience covering Congress and Maryland state government.
His work includes coverage of the election of Donald Trump, the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and attorneys general William Barr and Jeff Sessions-as well as that of the Maryland General Assembly, Gov. Larry Hogan, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bryan has broken stories involving athletic and sexual assault scandals with the Baltimore Post-Examiner.
His original UMBC investigation gained international attention, was featured in People Magazine and he was interviewed by ABC’s “Good Morning America” and local radio stations. Bryan broke subsequent stories documenting UMBC’s omission of a sexual assault on their daily crime log and a federal investigation related to the university’s handling of an alleged sexual assault.