James Comey's Big Mistake

Hillary Clinton believes that when in the last days of her presidential campaign FBI director James Comey publicly released the news that more of her lost emails had been found on a recently seized laptop computer, it cost her the election:

https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/hillary-clinton-recalls-terrible-day-fbi-reopened-email-probe/

And she's probably right. James Comey's bumbling contribution to Hillary Clinton's defeat is one that he can never fully atone for, try as he might, and which will never be reported on accurately by our mainstream media because in doing so they would have to admit that he was actually trying to help her. It's an interesting story because Comey's re-opening of the Clinton email scandal eleven days prior to the election was in fact the final blow to Clinton's presidential campaign, so I'll go ahead and tell the story myself:

As background, after Hillary Clinton was appointed Obama's Secretary of State she set up a private email server in her own home which she used to conduct government business. This became a big story for her opponents during her campaign for president for two reasons -- one, she had been conducting government business at the highest level on an unsecured non-government server (in fact, a Serbian hacker began scanning Clinton's server shortly after it was set up), and two, she was evading the system for the logging of government emails (and three of her aides deleted 32,000 "personal" emails from her server after it's existence became known).

[Wikipedia] "In May 2016...  Inspector General Steve A. Linick released an 83-page report about the State Department's email practices. The Inspector General was unable to find evidence that Clinton had ever sought approval from the State Department staff for her use of a private email server, determining that if Clinton had sought approval, Department staff would have declined her setup because of the "security risks in doing so." Aside from security risks, the report stated that "she did not comply with the Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act." Each of these findings contradicted what Clinton and her aides had been saying up to that point. The report also stated that Clinton and her senior aides declined to speak with the investigators, while the previous four Secretaries of State did so."

Needless to say, the mainstream media went into full excuse-making mode for Hillary, and as the election neared, the email scandal was no longer a big story. And FBI director Comey had done his part to shield Clinton:

[Wikipedia] "On July 5, 2016, FBI Director Comey announced in a statement he read to press and television reporters at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, that the FBI had completed its investigation and was referring it to the Justice Department with the recommendation "that no charges are appropriate in this case." He added, "Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.""

After Comey declared the email scandal to be nothing serious, our mainstream media never tired of covering for Comey by describing him as a Republican "Bush appointee", implying it was therefore just crazy conspiracy theory thinking to believe he was covertly trying to help Hillary Clinton win the election. It's true that Comey, an assistant U.S. attorney during Bill Clinton's second term, was elevated by a unanimous vote in the Senate to Deputy Attorney General after being nominated by Bush during his first term. However, after Bush was re-elected Comey left the government to work in the private sector for the next eight years before Barak Obama called him back to become his second-term Director of the FBI. The idea that Obama didn't vet Comey to make sure he was "one of us" before appointing him to be head of the FBI is absurd on the face of it.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to the election. A laptop the FBI seized from the husband of Hillary's closest personal aide, Huma Abedin, was found to contain copies of thousands of Clinton's emails, some of which could have been missing Bengazi related emails that had been subpoenaed but never produced. The FBI had taken control of the laptop while investigating Huma's husband, Anthony Weiner, for sending sexually explicit emails to a 15 year-old girl.

This presented our FBI director Comey with a conundrum, and where our mainstream polling organizations failed him. It was a couple weeks before the election, and he had two choices -- release the news of the newly discovered missing emails before the election or release the news of their existence after the election -- and he had to decide which one would be better for Hillary Clinton. The obvious downside for releasing them after the election was that it would start off her presidency with a major diversion that would allow her enemies to revive the email controversy as she began her first term as president. The other better option was to release them before the election since according to the polls she had a big enough lead to win either way, and then once elected the voters would have demonstrated to all that her email controversy was not a major issue for them. She could thank him later.

After publicly announcing the existence of the recovered emails 11 days before the election, Comey started to get nervous. Clinton's political opponents raised a big hullabaloo, and her numbers began to slip a bit. So Comey had his assistants work around the clock to go through all the newly recovered emails so that he could announce two days before the election that there was no new information in the recovered emails that would change the original conclusion he had reached in July. The following day, stock and currency markets around the world rebounded in response (https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/11/07/asian-stocks-bounce-after-fbi-clears-clinton-over-emails/93412244/) and the polls still showed Clinton to be a certain winner. Comey gave a sigh of relief.

You can be sure that as election night returns began to show Donald Trump was going to edge out Hillary Clinton to become our next president, there was no one more aghast at what was happening than James Comey, especially when you consider that Comey was watching that night with his wife Patrice, who later said in an interview that "I wanted a woman President really badly, and supported Hillary Clinton. A lot of my friends worked for her, and I was devastated when she lost." Comey knew at that point that he was going end up being a pariah in both parties and that his career in the upper echelons of government was effectively over. Subsequent to that night Comey has come out as a Democrat, saying that the Republican Party "left me and many others," and that "these people don't represent anything I believe in." In 2018, Comey urged voters to vote for Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterm elections, writing that "All who believe in this country's values must vote for Democrats this fall."

The runner up after Hillary Clinton for the worst night of her life was Huma Abedin. She had been a loyal and adoring aide to Hillary Clinton and had plans for a long career attached to her, including soon to be head personal aide to the president of the United States. Now she was the disgraced contributor to Hillary Clinton's defeat with a husband who was known to have sent pictures of his private parts to underage girls. In Hillary Clinton's favor, she has never blamed Huma for what happened and has remained a loyal friend to her. I think part of the reason for that is likely to be that Hillary knows she herself had a role in how those emails found their way to the laptop.

A year after the election the State Department announced that among the many thousands of Clinton emails that were found on Huma Abedin's laptop, at least 2,800 were newly discovered work related emails, some of them marked as "classified". James Comey hypothesized that Abedin had been forwarding some of Clinton's emails to her husband to print out, but that doesn't explain why there were so many of them and why they were still on the laptop. It would be more reasonable to assume that Hillary asked Huma to back up those emails from her server before she had her "personal" emails deleted.

James Comey, of course, has never directly admitted that he was trying to help Hillary Clinton, claiming that his conundrum was more the result of trying to do what was best for the image of the FBI. But in his 2018 book "A Higher Loyalty" he says that his decision to release the existence of the new trove of Clinton emails "may have been unconsciously influenced" by the fact that he considered it extremely likely that Clinton would become the next president. That's probably the closest we'll ever get to an admission that his real concern at the time was what would be in the best interest of Hillary Clinton.