James Comey's October Surprise - The New Yorker

James Comey's October Surprise - The New Yorker
Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail with her aide Huma Abedin. The F.B.I. found new e-mails related to Clinton while investigating Abedin’s husband, Anthony Weiner. Credit Photograph by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

On Friday morning, James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, sent a letter to the heads of several committees on Capitol Hill, in which he said he wished to “supplement” the testimony he gave in July about the Bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server. During that testimony, Comey had defended his decision not to bring any charges in the case, even though his agents had found evidence that Clinton and her aides were, in his words, “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

In his letter on Friday, Comey wrote, “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” Comey added that the agency couldn’t yet determine “whether or not this material may be significant or not,” or “how long it will take us to complete this additional work.”

Comey’s letter was brief and, evidently, carefully stated. Remarkably, though, its release wasn’t accompanied by any contextual information or background briefing to either lawmakers or the press. It made its way to much of the media in the form of a tweet posted shortly before 1 P.M. by Jason Chaffetz, the Republican Congressman from Utah who chairs the House Committee on Oversight, and who is a longtime Clinton tormentor. “FBI Dir just informed me, ‘The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,’ ” Chaffetz’s tweet said. “Case reopened.”

Within minutes, the cable networks had picked up on Chaffetz’s message. At 1:09 P.M., Fox News tweeted: “BREAKING NEWS: @jasoninthehouse; @HillaryClinton email–‘Case reopened.’ ” On social media, several reporters quickly pointed out that Comey himself hadn’t used the word “reopened.” By then, though, it was too late. Just eleven days before the election, the F.B.I. director had dropped on the world the news that his agency had found new e-mails connected with the Clinton investigation, and was delving into them. This, and the lack of any clarifying information, was enough to create a media frenzy, send the stock market into a (short-lived) dive, and infuriate many Clinton supporters.

In a statement, John Podesta, the chairman of the Clinton campaign, called on Comey to “immediately provide the American public more information than is contained in the letter he sent to eight Republican committee chairmen.” The statement continued, “Director Comey’s letter refers to emails that have come to light in an unrelated case, but we have no idea what those emails are and the Director himself notes they may not even be significant. It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just eleven days out from a presidential election.”

The Trump campaign, of course, reacted with delight. “A great day in our campaign just got even better,” Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, tweeted. Trump himself, after spending months portraying Comey as a Clinton patsy who inexplicably failed to prosecute his opponent, told a rally in New Hampshire, “I have great respect for the fact that the F.B.I. and the D.O.J. are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made.”

Comey, meanwhile, kept quiet. But, as the afternoon progressed, more information dribbled out in the form of news reports based on conversations with unnamed officials. Shortly after two o’clock, Pete Williams, NBC News’s justice correspondent, reported that although Comey told Congress in July that the Clinton investigation had been completed, it hadn’t technically ever ended. There were still some staffers working on the case, so it wasn’t accurate to say, as Chaffetz had done, that it had been reopened.

More important, Williams provided some actual details about the newly discovered e-mails. According to Williams, the e-mails in question were unrelated to the WikiLeaks dump of messages and documents hacked from Podesta’s account; they hadn’t been sent by Hillary Clinton; and they hadn’t been withheld from the F.B.I. by the Clintons, the Clinton campaign, or the State Department. What happened, Williams said, was that, in the course of a separate investigation, the F.B.I. had come across a “device” that had led them to the e-mails of interest.

This was crucial contextual information that, surely, Comey could have made public in his letter, or in a press briefing. While his letter said the agency was focussing on whether the newly found e-mails contained classified information, it didn’t address the key question of whether Clinton, or someone in her camp, had deliberately hidden them from the F.B.I. That allowed Trump and others to raise the spectre of blatant wrongdoing and obstruction of justice. (“It’s worse than Watergate,” Trump claimed.) But, according to Williams, there wasn’t any basis for these claims.

Indeed, Williams, a veteran correspondent who served as a Pentagon spokesman in the first Bush Administration, played down the significance of Comey’s letter. “It looks at this point like being very thorough and very careful, not that this is going . . . to be a game changer,” Williams told viewers. “One official said, ‘I don’t sense alarm bells going on at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department over this.’ ” Finally, Williams said there was no chance that the F.B.I. would finish up its investigation into the newfound e-mails before the election, on November 8th. The agency’s work would go on for quite a while, he said.

Williams’s reporting appeared to have cleared up quite a bit, and it made the news seem a lot less earth-shattering and damaging for Clinton than it had initially appeared. Evidently, the F.B.I. was trying to tie up some loose ends, not revisiting the central conclusion of its original inquiry: that there wasn’t a criminal case to bring against Clinton, or anybody associated with her. Later in the afternoon, a senior law-enforcement source told NBC News that Comey had sent the letter to Congress “out of an abundance of caution.”

But that left open questions about where the newly discovered e-mails had come from, about what they might contain, and about the nature of the other investigation that Comey had referred to. On social media, inevitably, there was speculation. At about one-thirty, Greg Pollowitz, an editor at Twitchy.com, tweeted out, “Hmmm. Maybe Weiner’s phone and emails from Huma?” Evidently, Pollowitz was referring to reports that the F.B.I. was investigating allegations that Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former Democratic congressman, who is married to (but separated from) Huma Abedin, a close aide to Hillary Clinton, had sent sexually explicit text messages to a minor.

Lo and behold, Pollowitz turned out to be right. About an hour after he posted his tweet, the Times put up a story under this headline: “New Emails in Clinton Case Came from Devices Once Used by Anthony Weiner.” The article attributed the information to “federal law enforcement officials.” Shortly after this happened, the hysteria on social media and the cable networks turned into pandemonium, and many heads, mine included, almost exploded.

Other news organizations were also on the case. By Friday night, the Wall Street Journal had reported that “the emails were discovered on a laptop used by both Ms. Abedin and Mr. Weiner, according to people familiar with the matter.” CNN said that the material the F.B.I. was reviewing ran to thousands of pages. At a brief press conference in Des Moines, Iowa, Clinton called on the F.B.I. to “explain this issue in question, whatever it is, without any delay.” She said, “Voting is under way, so the American people deserve to get the full and complete facts immediately.”