White House press secretary Sarah Sanders Sunday slammed former FBI Director James Comey for making decisions based on the political landscape instead of the facts of the Hillary Clinton email case.
Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Sanders said the interview Comey did with ABC — in which he said he reopened the Clinton email case because he thought she would win the election, and if he didn’t open the investigation again, she would be seen as illegitimate — showed his true colors.
“The guy knew exactly what he was doing. He thought Hillary Clinton would win. He thought this could give him cover,” she said. “He made the decisions based on the landscape, not on the facts of the case. When the person who is supposed to lead the highest law enforcement agency in our country starts making decisions based on political environments instead of on what is right and wrong, it’s a dangerous position.”
Comey said in the interview he may have had political considerations in the back of his mind when he eventually made the call to reopen the investigation.
“I don’t remember spelling it out, but it had to have been, that she’s going to be elected president and if I hide this from the American people, she’ll be illegitimate the moment she’s elected, the moment this comes out…I have asked myself many times since if I was influenced by that assumption,” Comey said to ABC. “I don’t know. Certainly not consciously, but I would be a fool to say it couldn’t have had an impact on me.”
That answer is a joke, Sanders said.
“He said he opened the Hillary Clinton investigation on its merits. Now we’re finding out it had something to do with the political landscape,” she said. “I found it outrageously unbelievable that Jim Comey, the man who takes copious notes and recollects every detail of every conversation he had can’t remember [why] he would have opened an investigation into a presidential candidate, particularly somebody he thought would become the president.”
