Even absent Hillary Clinton’s latest bleat about how he cost her the election, FBI director James Comey’s testimony on Wednesday at a routine oversight hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee was certain to be anything but routine. And sure enough, Comey mounted a vigorous defense of his letter of October 28, 2016 — eleven days before Election Day — in which he informed Congress that the Clinton e-mails investigation had been reopened.
Director Comey did nevertheless allow that he was made “mildly nauseous” by the suggestion that his letter affected the vote’s outcome.
Several features of the hearing were especially worth noting. I have dealt with one of them in a separate column — viz., the director’s continuing defense of his assessment that there was insufficient criminal-intent evidence to warrant charging Mrs. Clinton. Now, let’s turn to another: the Democrats’ effort to skew or erase entirely the context of Comey’s October 28 letter.
It would be foolish to deny that the letter may have had some impact on voters. The effect was likely very small: By the time of the letter (as our Jim Geraghty has related), 35 million Americans had already voted; most voters had already made up their minds about the e-mail scandal after many months of coverage and commentary; Comey’s notification did not announce charges or accuse Clinton of additional wrongdoing; and the ultimate determination that the new evidence did not change the FBI’s decision against bringing charges was also announced before Election Day. Still, to say President Trump’s margin of victory was “razor thin” is an understatement. So close was the contest that it is hard to discount anything as a factor possibly material to the outcome.
That said, Democrats would now have you believe that history began on October 28. In reality, the critical context of that day’s letter to Congress was the Comey press conference four months earlier — on July 5 — followed by the director’s extensive congressional testimony in the days that followed. It makes no sense for Democrats to complain about the letter and its departure from protocol but ignore the press conference’s far more extensive departures. To the (debatable) extent that there was a need to notify Congress in late October that the investigation had been reopened, it was precisely because the director, in early July, had made a highly unusual, highly public pronouncement that the investigation was complete and the case too weak to charge.
You may recall the unrestrained Democratic glee over that particular breach of protocol.
Of course, smarter Democrats perceive this incongruity. Thus, rather than ignore the Comey press conference, they bowdlerize it, choosing to remember only the first three-quarters of Comey’s bravura performance. That, you’ll recall, is the part in which the director rebuked Clinton for her inappropriate conduct, her “extreme carelessness” in handling highly classified information, the cavalier culture that prevailed during Clinton’s State Department tenure regarding the need to safeguard intelligence, and so on.
What Democrats choose to forget, and hope you will too, is the closing section of Comey’s remarks. That was when he seized the power of the Justice Department to render legal conclusions about both the prosecutorial merits of the case and the interpretation of the relevant criminal statute. In this conclusion, not only did Comey claim that Clinton’s conduct did not warrant an indictment, he gratuitously added the declaration that no “reasonable prosecutor” could disagree with his assessment.
This was a specious claim, but it commanded a respectful hearing, having come from an official who was not just the nation’s top investigator but had been a highly accomplished, top-ranking prosecutor in his own right. And remember (even if Dems prefer that you forget), Comey’s “lack of criminal intent” theory swept aside not only the classified-information felonies but also Clinton’s willful destruction of tens of thousands of government records — more felonies. By the time the press conference ended — poof! — it was as if someone had taken BleachBit to the thought of filing such charges.
Now that Clinton has lost and Democrats need a scapegoat, they have suddenly developed amnesia over this decisive aspect of the Comey press conference. But it saved Clinton’s candidacy. Now that we know what a lousy campaign she ran from July to November, Democrats understandably don’t regard this as any great favor. Back in July, however, when they were so sure that only Comey — and certainly not Donald Trump — could derail the next Clinton administration, Democrats could not have been more effusive in proclaiming the director’s unwavering integrity and legal acumen.
Now that Clinton has lost and Democrats need a scapegoat.