By Matt Taibbi. Comey is equally two-faced on the question of surveillance. And though he professed otherwise in his confirmation hearings, the reality is that Comey mostly just climbed the ladder through the wholesale dismantling of civil liberties that took place during the Bush and Obama years. Comey, at times ostentatiously precise in his recollections, is cagey about how and when he learned of the new Clinton emails uncovered as part of the Anthony Weiner dick-pic investigation:.
Comey here plunges into a Hamlet -esque dilemma over whether to go public about the re-opened investigation. He professes to be very concerned about having told Congress the investigation was closed, but again, Comey had no problem keeping his mouth shut or even outright obfuscating on demand in other cases.
But voters would have certainly found this story highly relevant. Why keep that secret in July but reveal the re-opening of the Clinton probe in October? There are multiple ways to interpret these decisions. Few are kind to Comey. The most likely scenario seems to be that Comey did indeed expect Clinton to be elected president and was engaging in a tried-and-true FBI power play against his future boss.
Say what? Comey here seemingly throws Lynch under the bus, hinting at a blockbuster story about improper pre-election connections between the Clinton campaign and the then-attorney general. Comey claims he was concerned that after stolen emails began appearing on the Internet that summer, some of this explosive-but-unverified material would come out.
So who knows what it means? The only thing we know is that Comey claims he had something that would have looked politically damaging to both Hillary Clinton and Loretta Lynch. As with so many things leaked from the intelligence community, it is impossible to evaluate the importance of this information without knowing more.
