On Sunday afternoon, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid ramped up the ante in the growing scandal surrounding FBI Director James Comey’s decision to tell Congress that his agency was reviewing emails that could potentially be related to Hillary Clinton’s private email server. He flatly accused Comey of violating the Hatch Act by writing his now-infamous letter 11 days before Election Day while sitting on potentially “explosive information” about the cozy relationship between Donald Trump and Russia.
Granted, there was already enough to demand Comey’s resignation. After all, it is clear not just beyond reasonable doubt, but beyond ALL doubt, that his handling of such a politically explosive investigation has been grossly incompetent at best. We now know that the FBI not only didn’t know whether any of the emails were even relevant to the Hillary case, but hadn’t obtained a warrant for the emails it found on the laptop of longtime Hillary aide Huma Abedin while investigating her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. And yet, Comey felt he had to rush pell-mell to Capitol Hill to tell Congress about this development. And we also know that the FBI had known about these emails for the better part of a month, and yet sat on them despite the stakes.
But criminal abuse of power? I wasn’t so sure. In light of some yeoman reporting by CNBC, though, Reid’s letter doesn’t sound so outlandish anymore. It turns out that earlier this month, Comey opposed issuing a formal warning that the Kremlin was trying to monkey around with the election. Why? Wait for it–he thought it was too close to Election Day to issue such a warning.
Back on October 7, the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence issued a “joint security statement” that blamed Russia for a recent spate of cyberattacks on American political organizations and election boards. The statement declared in no uncertain terms that the disclosures of hacked emails on WikiLeaks and other venues bore Russia’s fingerprints, and were made with the intent to “interfere with the U. S. election process. Moreover, it all but accused Russian President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle of being behind the attacks.
“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
Now, what does this have to do with the FBI? Well, fast forward to Monday afternoon. Just before the markets closed, CNBC’s Eamon Javers dropped a bombshell–while Comey agreed that Russia was responsible for the hacks, he didn’t want the warning to go out–at least with the FBI’s name on it. Watch here.
A former FBI official told Javers that Comey agreed that “a foreign power was trying to influence the election.” However, he opposed putting it out until after the election–supposedly because, at the time, it was less than a month before Election Day. Ultimately, he had no objections to the statement being released, but stipulated that “it shouldn’t come from the FBI.” Ultimately, the alert was released without the FBI’s name on it.
When Ian Milhiser of Think Progress mentioned this, I thought this was snark. After all, you would think that if there was any reason for an exception to the policy against commenting about politically explosive investigations before an election, it would be when a foreign power is trying to undermine the very integrity of our democracy.
Process this for a moment. When the FBI gets virtually uncontestable evidence that Russia is trying to meddle with the election, it isn’t willing to sign off on a formal warning about this threat because it is too close to Election Day. And yet, when the FBI learned about the emails on Abedin’s laptop, Comey felt compelled to hightail it to Capitol Hill about them even though he and his troops didn’t even know if they were relevant to the investigation and hadn’t bothered to ask a court for permission to review them. What’s wrong with this picture?
Reid bluntly accuses Comey of having a “highly selective approach to publicizing information.” Based on what we learned on Monday, “highly selective” is being extremely generous. At this point, it might be time for a third party to take a look at Comey’s decision-making process in both of these matters–one with subpoena power. After all, this is getting well beyond something that can be chalked up to incompetence.
But even before then, one thing is clear. When an FBI director thinks that emails whose relevance is uncertain are a bigger threat than a foreign power playing games with our election, it’s time for that director to go. Now.
(featured image courtesy DonkeyHotey, available under a Creative Commons-BY license)
