Comey decided to go ahead with the press conference because of supposed concerns he had with his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch. His decision was reportedly influenced by a forged Russian document that sought to discredit Lynch. It was fake, but Comey was still concerned (more on that in the next chapter). Comey has also pointed to the fact that Lynch and my husband had a brief, unplanned conversation on a tarmac in Phoenix in late June 2016, when their planes happened to be next to each other. Nothing inappropriate was said in any way, but both of them came to regret exchanging pleasantries that day because of the firestorm that followed. There’s no doubt that the optics were bad, but that didn’t give Comey carte blanche to ignore Justice Department policies and overstep his bounds. The implication that Lynch, a distinguished career prosecutor, was suddenly compromised and couldn’t be trusted is outrageous and insulting. It’s also insulting to the former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and all the other senior Justice Department officials who were in the chain of command.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t Comey’s last—or most damaging—mistake.
He violated every rule in the book governing the conduct of federal law enforcement officials and did so in a way that was partisan and that indubitably affected the outcome of the election.
—Elliott Jacobson, one of Comey’s former colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York who has served as a prosecutor for nearly thirty-seven years, in a letter to the editor of the New York Times, April 26, 2017
On October 28 I was headed to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for a rally with the leaders of several major women’s advocacy groups. My friend Betsy was with me on the plane. Annie Leibovitz, the legendary photographer, was along as well to snap candid photos of life on the trail. The election was just eleven days away, and early voting was already in full swing in thirty-six states and the District of Columbia. I was taking nothing for granted, but I was feeling good about our momentum coming out of three successful debates, strong poll numbers, and early-vote projections.
When we landed in Cedar Rapids, Robby Mook, Nick Merrill, and communications director Jennifer Palmieri said they had some news to share. “We have something to tell you, and it’s not good,” Jennifer said. I had a sinking feeling. Things had been going too well for too long. We were due for trouble. “What now?” I asked. “Jim Comey . . .” Jennifer began, and I immediately knew it was bad.
We didn’t have a lot of information, because the internet had been very spotty on the flight, but Jennifer said it seemed that Comey had sent a brief, vaguely worded letter to eight different congressional committees saying that in connection with an unrelated case, “the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent” to the previously closed investigation into my handling of classified information—although “the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant.”
Jason Chaffetz, the then-Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, immediately tweeted with glee: “Case reopened.”
Was this a bad joke? It had to be. The FBI wasn’t the Federal Bureau of Ifs or Innuendoes. Its job was to find out the facts. What the hell was Comey doing?
I got off the plane and into the waiting motorcade, beckoning Betsy to join me in the car. What a relief to have my friend with me.
By the time we finished the rally and got back to the plane, the team had learned more. I sat back down in my seat, across from Huma and Betsy, and asked Jennifer to fill me in. How much crazier could this story get?
A lot.
The unrelated federal investigation turned out to be the one into Huma’s estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. His lawyers had turned over a laptop of his to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. FBI agents from the New York field office searched the computer and found emails between Huma and me.
When we heard this, Huma looked stricken. Anthony had already caused so much heartache. And now this.
“This man is going to be the death of me,” she said, bursting into tears.
After more than twenty years working with Huma, I think the world of her, and seeing her in such distress broke my heart. I looked at Betsy, and we both got up to comfort her. I gave her a hug while Betsy patted her shoulder.
In the days that followed, some people thought I should fire Huma or “distance myself.” Not a chance. She had done nothing wrong and was an invaluable member of my team. I stuck by her the same way she has always stuck by me.
The more we learned, the more infuriating the story became. The FBI didn’t ask Huma or me for permission to read the emails it found, which we would have granted immediately. In fact, they didn’t contact us at all. At the time, the FBI had no idea if the emails were new or duplicates of ones already reviewed, or if they were personal or work related, let alone whether they might be considered classified retroactively or not. They didn’t know anything at all. And Comey didn’t wait to learn more. He fired off his letter to Congress two days before the FBI received a warrant to look at those emails.
Why make a public statement like this, which was bound to be politically devastating, when the FBI itself couldn’t say whether the new material was important in any way? At the very end of his July 5 press conference, Comey had declared sanctimoniously, “Only facts matter,” but here the FBI didn’t know the facts and didn’t let that stop it from throwing the presidential election into chaos.
Comey’s actions were condemned swiftly by former Justice Department officials of both parties, including Republican Attorneys General Alberto Gonzales and Michael Mukasey, the latter of whom said that Comey “stepped way outside his job.”
The Department of Justice’s Inspector General also opened an investigation into Comey’s conduct.
Before Comey sent his letter, Justice Department officials reminded Comey’s deputies of the long-standing policy to avoid any activity that could be viewed as influencing an election. According to reporting by the New York Times, they also said there was no need to inform Congress before the FBI determined if the emails were pertinent. A member of Comey’s team at the FBI also raised concerns. If Comey had waited until after the FBI had reviewed the emails, he would have learned quickly that there was no new evidence. Comey sent his letter anyway.
The result, according to Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, was so damaging that “the FBI is unlikely to regain public and congressional trust until it has a Director who understands the gravity of the mistakes and pledges never to repeat them.”
So why did Comey do it?
In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on March 3, 2017, Comey testified that he saw only two choices: “speak” or “conceal.” But as Rosenstein noted in his memo, “ ‘Conceal’ is a loaded term that misstates the issue. When federal agents quietly open a criminal investigation, we are not concealing anything; we are simply following the long-standing policy that we refrain from publicizing nonpublic information. In that context, silence is not concealment.”
I can’t know what was in Comey’s head. I don’t know if he had anything against me personally, or if he thought I was going to win the election and worried that if he didn’t speak out he’d later be attacked by Republicans or his own agents. What I do know, though, is that when you’re the head of an agency as important as the FBI, you have to care a lot more about how things really are than how they look, and you have to be willing to take the heat that goes along with the big job.
Whatever Comey was feeling or fearing, there is reason to be concerned about what was going on inside the FBI.
There’s a revolution going on inside the FBI, and it’s now at a boiling point.
—Rudy Giuliani on Fox News, October 26, 2016
According to Rudy and others with close ties to the FBI, there was a vocal faction within the bureau that was livid that, in their view, Comey had “let me off the hook” in July. “The agents are furious,” Jim Kallstrom, the former head of the FBI’s New York office and a close ally of the ex–New York Mayor, told the press. K
allstrom also endorsed Trump and described me as a “pathological liar” and member of “a crime family.” Kallstrom claimed to be in touch with hundreds of FBI agents, both retired and current. “The FBI is Trumpland,” is how another agent put it. The agent said I was regarded by some as “the Antichrist personified.” The New York Post reported that “FBI agents are ready to revolt.”
There was a rash of leaks designed to damage my campaign, including the quickly debunked false claim that indictments were coming relating to the Clinton Foundation.
Then Rudy, one of Trump’s top surrogates, went on Fox News on October 26 and promised “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next two days.” It was just two days later that Comey sent his letter.
On November 4 Rudy was back on Fox News and confirmed that he had advance warning. “Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it,” he said. At the same time, he tried to backpedal on his statement.
Several months later, Comey was questioned about this in that same Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
“Did anybody in the FBI during this 2016 campaign have contact with Rudy Giuliani about the Clinton investigation?” asked Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont. Comey said it was “a matter the FBI is looking into” and that he was “very, very interested” to learn the truth. “I don’t know yet, but if I find out that people were leaking information about our investigations whether to reporters or private parties, there will be severe consequences,” Comey said. This is a crucial question that must be answered. Comey owes it to the American people to say whether anyone at the FBI inappropriately provided Giuliani, Kallstrom, or anyone else with information. The bureau’s new leaders and the Justice Department Inspector General have a responsibility to investigate this matter fully and ensure accountability.
It’s galling that Comey took pains during the same period to avoid saying anything at all about the investigation into possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. This double standard has still never been explained adequately and it leaves me astonished.
The final week of the 2016 campaign was dominated by swirling questions about my emails and talk that the prayers of Trump supporters might finally be answered, and I’d somehow wind up in prison.
After nine days of turmoil—nine days in which millions of Americans went to the polls to vote early—and just thirty-six hours before Election Day, Comey sent another letter announcing that the “new” batch of emails wasn’t really new and contained nothing to cause him to alter his months-old decision not to seek charges.
Well, great. Too little, too late. The rest is history.
There is one more angle worth considering before I turn the page on this sordid chapter: the role of the press.
The ongoing normalization of Trump is the most disorienting development of the presidential campaign, but the most significant may be the abnormalization of Clinton.
—Jonathan Chait in New York magazine, September 22, 2016
“Abnormalization” is a pretty good description of how it felt to live through the maelstrom of the email controversy. According to Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, over the entire election, negative reports about me swamped positive coverage by 62 percent to 38 percent. For Trump, however, it was a more balanced 56 percent negative to 44 percent positive.
Coverage of my emails crowded out virtually everything else my campaign said or did. The press acted like it was the only story that mattered. To take just one egregious example, by September 2015, the then Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza had already written at least fifty pieces about my emails. A year later, the Post editorial board realized the story was out of control. “Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal,” they wrote in a September 2016 editorial.
No need to imagine. It happened.
The Post went on: “There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.”
That was one of many editorials and endorsements that got it right. I was glad to be endorsed by nearly every newspaper in the country, including some that hadn’t backed a Democrat in decades, if ever. Unfortunately, I don’t think many undecided voters read editorials, and they almost never influence broadcast or cable news. It’s the political stories on the front page that get read and picked up on TV. So even though some journalists and editors came to regret losing perspective and overdoing the coverage of my emails—and after the election, a few even shared their remorse in confidence—the damage was irreparable.
Considered alongside the real challenges that will occupy the next President, that email server, which has consumed so much of this campaign, looks like a matter for the help desk.
—New York Times endorsement of me for President, September 2016
The Times, as usual, played an outsized role in shaping the coverage of my emails throughout the election. To me, the paper’s approach felt schizophrenic. It spent nearly two years beating me up about emails, but its glowing endorsement applied some sanity to the controversy. Then, in the homestretch of the race, when it mattered most, the paper went right back to its old ways.
First, it devoted the entire top half of its front page to Comey’s October 28 letter, even though there was zero evidence of any wrongdoing and very few facts of any kind, and continued to give it breathless coverage for the rest of the week. Then, on October 31, the Times ran one of the single worst stories of the entire election, claiming the FBI saw no link between the Trump campaign and Russia. The truth was that a very serious counterintelligence investigation was picking up steam. The paper must have been sold a bill of goods by sources trying to protect Trump. It should have known better than to publish it days before the election. In both cases, it seemed as if speculation and sensationalism trumped sound journalism.
The Times was taken to task by its ombudsman for downplaying the seriousness of Russia’s meddling. “This is an act of foreign interference in an American election on a scale we’ve never seen, yet on most days, it has been the also-ran of media coverage,” wrote Liz Spayd on November 5, three days before Election Day. In stark contrast to reporting on my emails, “what was missing is a sense that this coverage is actually important.” In a follow-up column in January, Spayd noted that the Times knew in September the FBI was investigating the Trump organization’s ties to Russia, possibly including secret warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, yet didn’t tell the public. “It’s hard not to wonder what impact such information might have had on voters still evaluating the candidates,” she wrote. Good question! It gives a whole new meaning to what Bill likes to call “majoring in the minors.”
Over the years, going all the way back to the baseless Whitewater inquisition, it’s seemed as if many of those in charge of political coverage at the New York Times have viewed me with hostility and skepticism. They’ve applied what’s sometimes called the “Clinton Rules.” As Charles Pierce put it in Esquire magazine, “the Clinton Rules state that any relatively commonplace political occurrence or activity takes on mysterious dark energy when any Clinton is involved.” As a result, a lot of journalists see their job as exposing the devious machinations of the secretive Clinton Machine. The Times has by no means been the only—or even the worst—offender, but its treatment has stung the most.
I’ve read the Times for more than forty years and still look forward to it every day. I appreciate much of the paper’s terrific non-Clinton reporting, the excellent op-ed page, and the generous endorsements I’ve received in every campaign I’ve ever run. I understand the pressure that even the best political journalists are now under. Negative stories drive more traffic and buzz than positive or evenhanded ones. But we’re talking about one of the most important news sources in the world—the paper that often sets the tone for everyone else—which means, I think, that it should hold
itself to the highest standard.
I suppose this mini-rant guarantees that my book will receive a rip-her-to-shreds review in the Times, but history will agree that this coverage affected the outcome of the election. Besides, I had to get this off my chest!
This may shock you: Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest.
—former New York Times editor Jill Abramson in the Guardian, March 28, 2016
Jill Abramson, who oversaw years of tough political coverage about me, came to this conclusion by looking at data from the fact-checking organization PolitiFact, which found I told the truth more than any other presidential candidate in 2016, including both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, who was the most dishonest candidate ever measured. The fact that this was seen as surprising says a lot about the corrosive effect of the never-ending email controversy, and all the decades of baseless attacks that preceded it.
But her emails!
—the internet, 2017
The further we’ve gotten from the election, the more outlandish our excessive national focus on emails has seemed. “But her emails!” became a rueful meme used in response to the latest Trump revelations, outrages, and embarrassments.
As hard as it is to believe or explain, my emails were the story of 2016. It didn’t matter that the State Department Inspector General said there were no laws or regulations prohibiting the use of personal email for official business. It didn’t matter that the FBI found no reasonable legal grounds to bring any kind of case.
The original decision to use personal email was on me. And I never figured out how to make people understand where I was coming from or convince them that I wasn’t part of some devious plot. But it wasn’t me who determined how Comey and the FBI handled this issue or how the press covered it. That’s on them.
What Happened Page 31
