Former FBI Director James Comey doesn’t believe anyone in the government brought politics into the Hillary Clinton email investigation — aside from then-President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who he believes “jeopardized” the Department of Justice.
In his upcoming book, A Higher Loyalty, due out on Tuesday, Comey defends the FBI investigators who were charged with investigating Clinton’s private email server and her mishandling of classified information. The Washington Examiner obtained a copy of the book Sunday.
“I never heard anyone on our team — not one — take a position that seemed driven by their personal political motivations. And more than that: I never heard an argument or observation I thought came from a political bias. Never,” Comey writes in his book. “Instead we debated, argued, listened, reflected, agonized, played devil’s advocate, and even found opportunities to laugh as we hashed out major decisions.”
Instead, the people who complicated the investigation the most with their political statements were Obama and Lynch.
[Related: Trump: James Comey ‘committed many crimes’ while investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails]
Comey said Obama’s public statements about the investigation “jeopardized” the investigation’s credibility in multiple interviews and seemed to absolve Clinton of any crime before FBI investigators completed 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.”
“The truth was that the president — as far as I knew, anyway — he had only as much information as anyone following it in the media. He had not been briefed on our work at all. And if he was following the media, he knew nothing, because there had been no leaks at all up until that point. But, his comments still set all of us up for corrosive attacks if the case were completed with no charges brought.”
Comey also describes a September 2015 meeting with Lynch that he previously talked about in front of a Senate committee, in which the then-attorney general asked him to describe the investigation into Clinton’s emails as a “matter.”
[Also read: Loretta Lynch fires back at James Comey]
“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 added many people in the FBI who were with him in the meeting saw her request as political as well.
“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.
However, Comey said he never got the sense that Lynch interfered in the investigation.
“I, for one, didn’t see any instance when Attorney General Lynch interfered with the conduct of the investigation,” he said.
“Though I had been concerned about her direction to me at that point, I saw no indication afterward that she had any contact with the investigators or prosecutors on the case.”
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