Democrats crying foul over FBI director James Comey’s recent letter to Congress might consider this logic: If you don’t want the FBI involving itself in a presidential election, don’t nominate a candidate who’s under investigation by the FBI.
Last Friday, Comey informed Congress that the FBI has reopened its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, based on potentially incriminating evidence found during the FBI’s entirely separate investigation into allegations that disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner — estranged husband of Huma Abedin, Clinton’s closest confidante — had engaged in a relationship with an underage girl. The letter — which went not just to Republican committee leaders, as the Clinton camp mendaciously suggested, but to top Democrats, too — flouted law-enforcement protocols. The Justice Department customarily eschews commenting publicly on the status of a criminal investigation in which no charges have been filed, and it frowns on “overt action” that could potentially affect an imminent election.
But some perspective is in order. Every sin of which Comey is now accused he committed in July, in his extraordinary press conference (and subsequent congressional testimony) announcing his recommendation against the prosecution of Mrs. Clinton and pronouncing her case “closed,” neither of which was in line with FBI protocol. At that time, Democrats’ only criticism of Comey was that he had the chutzpah to scold Clinton’s conduct as “reckless”; otherwise, he was laureled as an exemplary public servant. Clinton, meanwhile, has worn her almost-indictment like a badge of honor, contorting it into a full-scale, unqualified exoneration — which, again, it most certainly was not.
But law-enforcement protocols mandate supplementing or amending the record when new evidence — for example, a new, previously unexamined trove of e-mails — renders prior representations inaccurate, and Comey had promised to notify Congress if circumstances surrounding Clinton’s case changed.
Given the electoral stakes, it is no surprise that the Clinton campaign and leading Democrats are taking up their pitchforks.
It is by no means clear that the new evidence will result in charges. Comey has not come close to implying that. All that has happened here is that someone whose egregious misconduct made her the subject of a criminal investigation is now on alert that that investigation is still pending — as it should be: Suspects have no right to know the status of an investigation. Uncertainty and anxiety are the risks one runs living on the edge of criminality (or crossing well over the border, as Clinton appears to have done).
Still, Comey’s decision is particularly interesting when taken in concert with reports from the Wall Street Journal that the FBI has been investigating the Clinton Foundation for at least a year. While the mishandling of classified information is critically important, it seems more and more likely that the primary motive behind Clinton’s home-brew e-mail setup was to conceal how the State Department was pressed into the foundation’s service during Clinton’s tenure in Foggy Bottom — a situation that could entail bribery, fraud, and/or political-corruption charges. Regardless, that ongoing investigation makes even more scandalous the Justice Department’s decision to give immunity to key players in the e-mail scandal, and to destroy computers that likely contained evidence.
Given the electoral stakes, it is no surprise that the Clinton campaign and leading Democrats are taking up their pitchforks, Harry Reid even going so far as to suggest that Comey’s letter broke the law. But the time to complain was back in July. Having exploited the “exoneration” of Clinton for all it was worth, Democrats’ sudden concerns that the FBI is hijacking the electoral process are laughable.
If we find ourselves in a “constitutional crisis,” it will not be because of an FBI director run amok. More likely, it will be because the most ethically challenged presidential candidate in modern American history persists in her lawless ways — from the Oval Office.