President Obama doubled down on his implication that FBI Director James Comey may have acted improperly by alerting Congress that the agency was reviewing new emails that could be relevant to the case involving the propriety of Hillary Clinton’s personal email server.
Although he said he thinks Comey is a “good man” who is “not trying to influence the election one way or another,” in an interview with Al Sharpton on MSNBC Friday, Obama said he wants to continue with a “tradition” and a “norm” that FBI investigations are not “used as a weapon to advantage either side in partisan arguments.”
Obama parsed his words very carefully about Comey’s notification to Congress about the new emails less than two weeks before the election.
“I’m always very careful about speaking about active cases being handled by the Justice Department or the FBI, because I don’t want to appear as if I’m influencing them unduly,” Obama said. “The reason for that is, is that historically, both under Democratic and Republican administrations, our goal has been and should be that our investigators and our prosecutors are independent of politics, that they’re not politicized, that they’re not used as a weapon to advantage either side in partisan arguments.”
“And I want to make sure that we continue with that tradition and with that norm,” he added.
Obama went on to say that he thinks Comey is a public servant who “wants to do the right thing.”
“And I think the overwhelming majority of people in the Justice Department feel the same way,” he said. “What I have said is I want all of us to think about maintaining these norms — when you are investigating a case then unless you have unearthed something, you need to just do you job.”
Democrats and many Republicans alike have called on Comey to provide more information about the content of the emails in the wake of news that Comey was essentially renewing the investigation into Clinton’s private email server and whether she improperly exchanged classified material on it.
Obama first criticized Comey’s decision to reopen the investigation into Clinton’s private email server two days ago when he warned in a separate interview that people shouldn’t make up their minds based only on “innuendo.”
In that interview with NowThisNews, the president also said he has been making a “very deliberate effort” to avoid any appearance that he could be meddling in an independent investigation and would not discuss the particulars of the case. He also stressed that people should wait to make up their mind about the FBI’s actions until they hear details about the information the agency has found in the new emails.
The emails reportedly were found on Anthony Weiner’s computer during an investigation into allegations that he was sending sexually explicit texts to a minor. Weiner is the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, a top Clinton aide.
“I do think that there is a norm that when there are investigations, we don’t operate on innuendo, we don’t operate on incomplete information, we don’t operate on leaks,” Obama said Wednesday. “We operate based on concrete decisions that are made.”
In the Sharpton interview Friday, Obama also emphasized the usual FBI and Justice Department procedures involving investigations and prosecutions, even though the hyper-charged case into Clinton’s emails in the middle of an incredibly intense presidential election has been anything but routine.
“If there are things that you think are worth presenting, then you present them to a prosecutor. The prosecutor makes a judgment,” he said. “The prosecutor can make a decision either to file a charge or not to file a charge.”
“We give enormous power to our law enforcement officials to keep us safe, to do a great job, to protect us,” he said. “But we also put these norms and rules in place, some of them written, some of them unwritten, to make sure that any of us are not suddenly affected by innuendo or rumors.”
“And that’s true for ordinary citizens and it’s true for somebody who is running for president,” he said.
In trying to underscore the need for “prosecutors” at the Justice Department to make the final call in whether to charge Clinton with a crime or not, Obama didn’t mention the layers of complications in the case fraught with conflicts of interest at the highest levels.
Comey found himself in the politically precarious position of having to publicly recommend whether the Justice Department should indict Clinton only because of a now infamous meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch, whose decision it would be under normal circumstances, and former President Bill Clinton on tarmac at the Phoenix airport in late June.
The meeting became viral news almost immediately after it was over, with critics pointing out that she owed her attorney general position in part to President Bill Clinton, who had first named her U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York in 1999, a post which Obama handed her again in 2010.
Obama also omitted any mention of the well-documented internal battle between the FBI and the Justice Department over hard to pursue the investigations into pay-to-play allegations involving the Clintons’ charitable work and Hillary Clinton’s position as secretary of state.
The Justice Department also tried to stop Comey from sending the letter to Congress announcing that he had reopened the email case in late October, according to multiple reports.
While Lynch and Comey did not directly confront one another, according to reports, the disagreements were conveyed to Comey by Justice Department staff, who advised the FBI chief his letter would conflict with department policy not to comment on investigations close to an election.
