FBI Director James Comey defended the work of his agents Wednesday in a memo to staff, arguing the decision to spare Hillary Clinton and her aides from prosecution for their mistreatment of classified information was not a difficult one.
“I have no patience for suggestions that we conducted ourselves as anything but what we are — honest, competent, and independent,” Comey wrote in the memo, first obtained by CNN. “Those suggesting that we are ‘political’ or part of some ‘fix’ either don’t know us, or they are full of baloney (and maybe some of both).”
The FBI director faced renewed criticism Friday after his agency published a scathing 58-page summary of the Clinton email investigation just hours before the Labor Day weekend commenced.
But Comey stood by the timing of the report’s release, which came shortly after he said agents completed their review of the material.
“I almost ordered the material held until Tuesday because I knew we would take all kinds of grief for releasing it before a holiday weekend, but my judgment was that we had promised transparency and it would be game-playing to withhold it from the public just to avoid folks saying stuff about us,” he wrote. “We don’t play games. So we released it Friday.”
The report showed Clinton and her staff had claimed during the investigation to recall few details about the private email server that resided in the former secretary of state’s basement during her State Department tenure.
When Congress started asking questions about the agency’s lack of emails related to Benghazi, Clinton’s staff and employees of the tech firm tapped to manage her network scrubbed official records from the server system.
At unspecified times during her State Department stint, Clinton’s staff even destroyed with a hammer devices that had housed her emails.
Even so, Comey claimed his agents found no evidence that Clinton and her aides knowingly flouted the law.
“Through public statements, testimony (4 hours and 40 minutes without stopping, but who’s counting), and prompt document productions, we have offered unprecedented transparency of the high-quality work your colleagues did in the case,” the FBI director said in his memo to the bureau.
Comey said he would testify before the House Judiciary Committee on the last week in September at a hearing typically reserved for general oversight of the bureau, although he noted he was “guessing some folks will want to ask about the email investigation.”
Dismissing former FBI agents’ suggestions that indictments had been scuttled for political reasons, Comey said he “struggle[d] to see how” anyone could take a “different view” of the case than the one he has put forward.
“At the end of the day, the case itself was not a cliff-hanger; despite all the chest-beating by people no longer in government, there really wasn’t a prosecutable case,” he said. “The hard part was whether to offer unprecedented transparency about our thinking.”
