Politico: "The Very Political James Comey"

The Very Political James Comey
By Riley Roberts
(Speechwriter for former Attorney General Eric Holder)

The FBI director says he “doesn’t give a hoot” about politics. But when it comes to Clinton and her emails, he’s made a series of political decisions that have jeopardized the integrity of the FBI—and the U.S. election process.

FBI Director James Comey’s disdain for partisan politics is well known among his Justice Department colleagues. A respected former prosecutor who has held high-profile jobs in both Democratic and Republican administrations, this clean-cut father of six sees himself as a straight shooter who, in his own words, “doesn’t give a hoot” about politics.

But the past four months have completely exploded that notion. Since July, by repeatedly caving to political pressures as he sought to resolve an investigation that has now been grievously compromised by his own public statements, the director has led the bureau into its most politically perilous chapter in generations—with the presidential campaign hanging in the balance. It’s a crisis that’s unprecedented in FBI history—and the endgame, with just over a week until Election Day, is anything but clear.

The latest in the FBI director’s series of political bungles came over the course of the day on October 28—the second-to-last Friday before Election Day—when Comey approved, signed and sent two letters that will go down as infamous in the history of presidential politics and the annals of law enforcement.

In the first, addressed to the Republican chairmen of eight congressional committees, Comey dropped a bombshell that shook the presidential race. In defiance of longstanding tradition, Justice Department policy and an explicit warning from the department’s senior leadership, the director informed Congress that the FBI would be taking “appropriate investigative steps” to review “emails that appear to be pertinent” to its probe into Hillary Clinton’s email practices—a probe that Comey himself had very publicly laid to rest more than three months earlier.

With the second letter, addressed “To all” and distributed to FBI employees, the director made a feeble attempt at damage control. Acknowledging that the FBI doesn’t “ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations,” that it did not yet “know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails” and that his first letter carried “a significant risk of being misunderstood,” Comey defended his decision to subordinate the Justice Department’s clear-cut rules to his own personal judgment. “I … think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record,” he wrote, apparently oblivious to the fact that his ill-conceived “supplement” was already spawning dozens of misleading headlines, even plunging financial markets (briefly) into turmoil.

Together, these letters give the lie to Comey’s repeated insistence that the FBI is above politics, exposing that notion as both irrelevant—because, whatever his motivations, Comey’s actions have placed the FBI at center stage during the presidential campaign’s climactic moment—and absurd, because the director has, in fact, repeatedly bowed to political pressures arising from the Clinton investigation.
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