Comey: It Made Me ‘Mildly Nauseous’ To Think FBI Could Have Affected Election

ashley.rae | May 3, 2017
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While testifying at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, FBI Director James Comey said it made him “nauseous” to think his decision to reopen the investigation into former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails could impact the election, but that it was the right choice.

During the hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked Comey about the FBI reopening their investigation into Clinton’s email scandal and the “public letter” informing Congress about the information.

“October 27th, the investigative team that had finished the investigation in July, focused on Secretary Clinton’s emails, asked to meet with me,” Comey explained. “And they laid out for me what they could see from the metadata on this fellow Anthony Weiner’s laptop that had been seized in an unrelated case. What they could see from the metadata was that there were thousands of Secretary Clinton’s emails on that device, including what they thought might be the missing emails from her first three months as Secretary of State.”

“We never found any emails from her first three months.  She was using a Verizon Blackberry then and that’s obviously very important because if there was evidence that she was acting with bad intent, that’s where it would be in the first three months,” Comey said.

After being interrupted by Feinstein, Comey continued, “And so they came in and said we can see thousands of emails from the Clinton email domain, including many, many, many from the Verizon Clinton domain, Blackberry domain.”

After saying the Department of Justice agreed with getting a search warrant for the emails, Comey said:

So, I authorized them to seek a search warrant, and then I faced a choice. And I’ve lived my entire career by the tradition that if you can possibly avoid it, you avoid any action in the run up to the election that might have an impact, whether it’s a dog catcher election or President of the United States.

Comey said he faced two choices: one that would be “really bad,” and the other that would be “catostrophic.”

But I sat there that morning and I could not see a door labeled 'no action here.' I could see two doors and they were both actions: One was labeled 'speak,' the other was labeled 'conceal.'

‘Cause here’s how I thought about it. I’m not trying to talk you into this, but I want you to know my thinking.

Having repeatedly told this Congress we’re done and there's nothing there, there’s no case there, there’s no case there, to restart in a hugely significant way, potentially finding the emails that would reflect on her intent from the beginning, and not speak about it would require an act of concealment, in my view.

And so I stared at ‘speak’ and ‘conceal.’ ‘Speak’ would be really bad. There’s an election in 11 days. Lordy, that would be really bad. Concealing, in my view, would be catastrophic. Not just to the FBI, but well beyond. And honestly, as being really bad and catastrophic, I said to my team, we gotta walk into the world of really bad. I’ve got to tell Congress that we’re restarting this, not in some frivolous way, in a hugely significant way.

Comey said his team found thousands of new emails, including thousands of emails containing classified information in their investigation on Weiner.

Somehow, her emails are being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information, by her assistant, Huma Abedin. And so they found thousands of new emails and then called me the Saturday night before the election and said thanks to the wizardry of our technology, we’ve only had to personally read 6,000. We think we can finish tomorrow morning, Sunday.

While saying they found “a lot of new stuff,” Comey said his team did not find anything to change their opinion about Clinton’s intent.

 “Look, this was terrible. It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election. But honestly? It wouldn’t change the decision,” Comey said.

Comey said he would make the same decision again.

After Feinstein said the letter changed the outcome of the campaign, Comey said he would not consider “for a moment” whether reopening the investigation would lead to the election of President Trump because it would cause the “death of the FBI as an independent institution in America.”

Clinton has repeatedly blamed Comey for losing the election.

 

 

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