Dana Milbank, the Washington Post’s liberal columnist, who was also a liberal columnist while he covered the White House as a reporter, thinks James Comey lost the election for Hillary Clinton. Clinton wants us to think the same thing.
Mother Jones’ Kevin Jones concurs, and then tells us why: If Comey’s announcement on Oct. 28 that the investigation might have to be opened again due to the discovery of a new cache of emails did indeed swing the election against her, it means the loss was not her or the Democrats’ fault. But the New York Times’ Nate Cohn says that the trends that would boost Trump had shown themselves long before Comey said anything. And a long piece in the Post a day after Milbank’s says that a series of missteps taken by others had boxed Comey into a hopeless position, for which one can blame a number of people and things.
One is Bill Clinton, who on June 27 strolled across the tarmac at the airport at Phoenix for a chat with Attorney General Loretta Lynch. He had named her to the bench some years earlier, and Lynch, who though unnerved by the meeting, was afraid to evict her old friend. Dan Balz would call it a “terrible moment,” an “error of judgment” and a “huge lapse” on the part of both parties, boosting Trump’s claim that the system was “rigged.”
One more, of course, would be Anthony Wiener, arrested months later for sexting a minor. His laptop disclosed a cache of 600,000 plus emails between his wife and Hillary Clinton, leading the FBI to the conclusion that the case, closed in July, could be reopened if the emails revealed something new.
Comey should not be blamed. He was put in a terrible place, and faced a bad outcome in two of four choices: blamed by the Left if he announced the new emails and nothing was in them; blamed by the Right if something was found when the election was over; justified if he found and said nothing, or if he said something, and then something was found. Saying nothing, given the circumstance, may have seemed far too risky. There seems no cause to blame him, given the Clinton-Lynch tryst and the impression it made, if he opted for choice number one.
You can blame Bill Clinton, blame Anthony Wiener, or blame Huma Abedin for her bad taste in men, but that is like blaming the guard who discovered the Watergate burglars for the fact that Richard M. Nixon resigned.
Nixon planned a cover-up of a crime and then lied about it, while Hillary Clinton did things that sent others to prison, and lied. In the end, the history she made that turned out to matter was not that she was the first female presidential nominee of a major political party but that, as the Post had reported, “having a presidential candidate under active criminal investigation” was an unusual thing.
It was her fault that she, like Nixon, chose in the first place to do something illegal, and it was also the fault of her party that it went along. Think about this: The world’s oldest democratic political party, which spoke for millions on millions on millions of people, chose to put all its eggs in the basket of one nominee who was the object of an investigation that could (as it did) blow up in its face at any one moment — and now seems shocked and amazed that it did.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
