Is there a late surprise afoot in the US election?
The American public has an absolute right and urgent need to
know what, if
anything, the FBI has actually discovered
Hussein Ibish
Is it the most extraordinary October surprise yet, or a meaningless illusion? Either this changes everything as Donald Trump exulted, or it amounts to nothing. No one has a clue, and the American presidential election now hangs in limbo, with no indication of when or how the most basic questions about the latest dramatic development will be answered.
On Thursday night, there was every reason to believe Donald Trump had virtually no chance of beating Hillary Clinton. She held a substantial lead according to most polls, both nationally and in the all-important swing states, and a large funding advantage.
But by Friday afternoon, the election may have suddenly been thrown wide open. FBI director James Comey informed Congress that the bureau is reviewing newly discovered emails that appear to be pertinent to an investigation into Clintons communications that everyone had considered resolved.
Clinton has been haunted by her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. Almost 32,000 emails she considered personal communications were deleted from the server in an apparent violation of regulations adopted 10 months into her tenure.
On July 5, Comey announced the FBI was recommending no criminal charges be filed, and that he did not believe any laws had been broken. Nonetheless, he chided her for being extremely careless.
The FBI says it has discovered emails that appear to be pertinent to the server investigation, whatever that might mean, on a computer belonging to disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of a key aide to Clinton, Huma Abedin. Weiner, who has a long history of reckless online sexual behaviour, is the subject of an unrelated investigation for allegedly sending improper messages to a 15-year-old girl.
A virtual tsunami of breathless, but often misleading, reportage suggested the FBI had reopened its investigation into Clintons server.
The FBI says that it will review the messages to determine what, if any, relevance they have to that case. But it hasnt said how many emails will be examined, whether any were to or from Clinton, if any involve classified formation, or why the FBI considers them potentially pertinent.
Comey says he felt bound to inform Congress, even though the bureau has no idea about the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails.
So, at this stage, there is no indication that the FBI has discovered anything mildly interesting, let alone important, not to mention scandalous.
The public, however, was subjected to reporting that implied that a massive scandal had been uncovered or confirmed. The words Clinton, emails, FBI and investigation were typically strung together in a manner that created the impression that the Democratic nominee is a target of a major new criminal investigation, or that the old case has been reopened in some meaningful sense (it was never formally closed), or that a new bonanza of information (the word bombshell was ubiquitous) has been discovered. None of that is, at least for now, even remotely accurate.
Yet the presidential campaign has been thrown into utter disarray. Trump preposterously declared that this is bigger than Watergate. Clinton and members of Congress from both parties demanded that the FBI release the full and complete facts immediately. The justice department said it strongly opposed Comeys letter because it violates policies prohibiting influencing elections.
It is exceptionally difficult to evaluate the impact of Comeys reckless letter, which raised innumerably more questions than it answered.
The writer is a resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington
