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“Comey called out Obama and Lynch in his new book, A Higher Loyalty, set to come out on Tuesday. In it, he defends the FBI’s top brass and counterintelligence investigators charged with probing Clinton’s use of a private email server and mishandling of classified information, reports the Washington Examiner, which received an advanced copy.”
Comey says that multiple public statements made by Obama about the investigation “jeopardized” the credibility of the FBI investigation – seemingly absolving Clinton of any crime before FBI investigators were able to complete their work.
“Contributing to this problem, regrettably, was President Obama. He had jeopardized the Department of Justice’s credibility in the investigation by saying in a 60 Minutes interview on Oct. 11, 2015, that Clinton’s email use was “a mistake” that had not endangered national security,” Comey writes. “Then on Fox News on April 10, 2016, he said that Clinton may have been careless but did not do anything to intentionally harm national security, suggesting that the case involved overclassification of material in the government.”
“President Obama is a very smart man who understands the law very well. To this day, I don’t know why he spoke about the case publicly and seemed to absolve her before a final determination was made. If the president had already decided the matter, an outside observer could reasonably wonder, how on earth could his Department of Justice do anything other than follow his lead.” (Read more: Washington Examiner, 4/16/2018)
Zero Hedge reports, “Comey also describes a September 2015 meeting with AG Lynch in which she asked him to describe the Clinton email investigation as a “matter” instead of an investigation.
“It occurred to me in the moment that this issue of semantics was strikingly similar to the fight the Clinton campaign had waged against the New York Times in July. Ever since then, the Clinton team had been employing a variety of euphemisms to avoid using the word ‘investigation,’” Comey writes.
“The attorney general seemed to be directing me to align with the Clinton campaign strategy. Her “just do it” response to my question indicated that she had no legal or procedural justification for her request, at least not one grounded in our practices or traditions. Otherwise, I assume, she would have said so.
Comey said others present in the meeting with Lynch thought her request was odd and political as well – including one of the DOJ’s senior leaders.
“I know the FBI attendees at our meeting saw her request as overtly political when we talked about it afterward. So did at least one of Lynch’s senior leaders. George Toscas, then the number-three person in the department’s National Security Division and someone I liked, smiled at the FBI team as we filed out, saying sarcastically, “well you are the Federal Bureau of Matters,” Comey recalled.” (Read more: Zero Hedge, 4/16/2018)