Former FBI Director James Comey isn’t a knight in shining armor, or even at times the strong silent type one would want in a leader. But he also should not be an out for sore losers, a piñata for feminists, or a place for the Democrats to dump their resentments after their presidential candidate — referred to at times as “the first woman president” — managed to fade in the stretch.
To Hillary Clinton and friends, Comey was the man whose letter to Congress on Oct. 28, 2016, gave her campaign the stab in the back from which it would never recover. Comey sent her polls tumbling, and her campaign into a tailspin from which it would never emerge.
But if this were true, how could it be that before the election she was given an 80 percent chance or more to win the election? Why were Democrats everywhere filled with elation, and Clinton herself so sure she would break the glass ceiling that she had no prepared script for a potential concession, but let the draft of one sit in a drawer?
“The talking points we were receiving from Brooklyn were filled with happy news,” wrote Donna Brazile, chair of the Democratic National Committee, in her memoir. “Everything Hillary was hearing and seeing pointed to a victory,” Amie Barnes and Jonathan Allen wrote in Shattered. “Public polling showed Hillary with a clear lead nationally, and in enough battleground states to carry the election with room to spare.”
Early vote totals bore out these predictions. “We were feeling good about Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania,” an aide of hers told them. ‘We knew we had taken a hit from Comey, but we didn’t think it would be an insurmountable one. People were energized, and were having fun.”
But how much fun could it have if they had been depressed since Oct. 28? The Clintons expected to win all along. Comey’s letter emerged as the excuse du jour, and became the excuse in perpetuity only when the election was lost and explanations were needed. (After all, they weren’t about to place the blame on Clinton herself.)
What Comey did was a stretch, and unprecedented in the annals of his department. But consider the context. Did Comey in 2009 urge Clinton to conduct her state business on an insecure private server located in her basement in Chappaqua, N.Y.? Did Comey decide which parts of what ought to have the official state record to keep or erase by herself?
Did he urge former President Bill Clinton to pay a closed-door, half-hour call on his friend the attorney general on the tarmac in Phoenix, just days before the verdict of the investigation into his wife’s use of her server was scheduled to come due? Did Comey prompt Anthony Weiner, disgraced husband of Hillary Clinton’s closest of aides, to resume his old pornographic Internet hobby at just the wrong moment, leading to his arrest, his imprisonment, and the confiscation of his laptop, on which emails between his wife and Hillary Clinton were found?
The blame has been put on a number of people and perhaps even things, but Comey’s letter was at the tail end of a chain of events that had been set into motion many years earlier, not by some “right-wing conspiracy.” She and her closest friends did it all to themselves.
