President Obama appeared to criticize FBI Director James Comey’s decision to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, and warned that people shouldn’t make up their minds based only on “innuendo.”
The president said he has been making a “very deliberate effort” to avoid any appearance that he could be meddling in an independent FBI investigation and would not discuss the particulars of the case. But in an interview with NowThisNews released Wednesday, Obama stressed that people should wait to hear details what real information the FBI has found.
“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. “We operate based on concrete decisions that are made.”
It was Obama’s first public comment about Comey’s decision to alert Congress that he had started reviewing new emails that may be related to the Clinton email probe, which he closed without recommending an indictment in July.
Obama stressed that Comey had previously essentially exonerated Clinton from any criminal culpability when he argued that no “reasonable” prosecutor would move forward with charges based on the evidence the FBI had gathered at that point. He made that finding even though he determined that Clinton and her aides had been “extremely careless” with classified information on the private server.
“When this was investigated thoroughly the last time, the conclusion of the FBI, the conclusion of the Justice Department, the conclusion of repeated congressional investigations was that, you know, she had made some mistakes, but that there wasn’t anything there that was prosecutable,” Obama said.
He also defended Clinton as a victim of hard-knuckled politics, arguing that she’s been “knocked around” a lot in the political arena over the course of 30 years.
“People say crazy stuff about her, and when she makes a mistake — an honest mistake — it ends up being blown up, as it’s just some crazy thing,” he said.
For people tuning into her career for the first or second time, he said, all the “noise coming at you” about Clinton’s ethics problems might make voters think, ‘Oh well, there’s something maybe I should be worried about.'”
He went on to express “absolute confidence in her integrity.”
“I trust her. I know her. And, you know, I wouldn’t be supporting her if I didn’t have absolute confidence in her integrity and her interest in making sure that young people have a better future,” he said.
