Comeys misadventure was careless and reckless
Neither
Comey nor his employees had read these emails when he informed Congress about them. As it
happened, they contained
nothing new and supported no charges of wrongdoing
Sholto Byrnes
Forget the current fuss about Russian hacking of the US Republican and Democratic parties. It is serious. But it is also overblown, as it has been known about for months, and the conclusions about what the ultimate aim of the intrusions was to undermine the whole process, or support Donald Trump are contradictory and will probably never be settled conclusively.
No. Far more important is new evidence that suggests that the US presidential election was indeed rigged. But not by Russia, but by a very senior American official no less than the director of the FBI, James Comey.
Rigged might be too strong a word. But his improper actions in announcing that the bureau was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clintons use of a private email server just before the election almost certainly lost her the White House.
According to the renowned US polls analyst Nate Silver, new analysis shows that late voters shifted overwhelmingly towards Donald Trump in the last week of the campaign, moving the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania into the Donalds column, and making him the president-elect.
Comey had a large, measurable impact on the race, he tweeted. Ill put it like this: Clinton would almost certainly be president-elect if the election had been held on October 27 (the day before Comeys letter).
So let us be clear. Comey had no business making his announcement about the emails. His action swung the election for his fellow Republican, Donald Trump. And for this he is likely to suffer no consequence whatsoever.
If this kind of act can take place with impunity, then we should all be deeply concerned about the state of US democracy not least since the consequences of the different foreign policy likely to be steered under the forthcoming administration will be, and are already being, felt around the world.
This is not to argue against the legitimacy of Trumps victory. There is no suggestion that Comey colluded with the Trump campaign, and the president-elect clearly won the electoral college, which is all that counts.
Comey made the announcement about renewing the investigation after emails relating to s Clinton were found on the computer of Anthony Weiner, a disgraced former congressman who is separated from her close aide Huma Abedin.
Neither Comey nor his employees had read these emails when he informed Congress about them. As it happened, they contained nothing new and supported no charges of wrongdoing. But Comey must have known that telling Congress he was reopening the investigation would lead many to assume that they did.
Next, he shouldnt have been talking about this publicly, or via means that he knew would ensure that it would be made public (ie writing to Congress). The US justice department guidelines state that officials shall not respond to questions about the existence of an ongoing investigation or comment on its nature or progress.
Exceptions may be made for matters that have already received substantial publicity. But then Comey was the person who hyped up the publicity by declaring s Clintons behaviour to be extremely careless when he originally announced that the investigation was over in July.
As the Georgetown law professor David Cole put it in the New York Review of Books: The federal criminal code is Byzantine, to be sure, but carelessness is not a federal crime, and therefore, as FBI director, Comey had no business offering his opinion.
The authority of the nations top law enforcement investigator comes with responsibility to weigh ones words and actions carefully; if anything, it was Comey who was extremely careless.
Lastly, Comey violated a long-standing justice department policy that indictments should not be filed, and investigations should not be disclosed, against any individuals running for office in the 60 days before polls.
Not only has the GOP establishment in practice ignored the wishes and the aspirations of its base, with candidates such as Mitt Romney switching to the middle ground after assiduously courting angry right-wingers during the primaries. They have also encouraged a type of false consciousness among their voters, who have bought into the rhetoric that big government is always the problem, and that lower taxes will make them wealthy when in practice it is lower and middle-class Americans who most need the state, and candidates such as Romney, not them, who benefit from having to pay a smaller proportion of their income to Uncle Sam.
This contradiction has finally been exposed by the rise of Trump. True, he would decrease tax rates (and simplify them, which would be a bonus). But he is so much in favour of increased federal spending, intervention in free markets, and maintaining the social welfare programmes on which many of his poor white supporters depend, that the TV host Joe Scarborough has said: Hes not a conservative. Hes not even a Republican. Hes a big-government liberal from Manhattan who hijacked an entire party.
Trumps authoritarian populism is not conventional conservatism by any measure. But it has appealed to the hordes of ordinary Republicans energised by depictions of Democrats as socialist elites who ignored white working and lower middle-class America while they were led by rich elites who legislated and governed for the few, not the many.
The distance between GOP leaders and voters has to be thrashed out if it is to have a chance to return to being the party of Ronald Reagan a man who, while nominally the partys hero, would be considered today to be too left wing and given to compromise by the Tea Party wing that has called the shots for too long.
Secondly, bipartisanship must return to Congress. Obstructionist Republicans have shown such a lack of willingness to seek common ground that the GOPs John Boehner, by historical standards a very conservative speaker of the house, was effectively forced out by hardliners who accused him of compromising too much and this was a man under whose leadership Republicans caused a government shutdown in 2013.
This policy has been supported by both Republican and Democratic administrations, as two former deputy attorney-generals from the two parties wrote in the Washington Post in late October: Such actions or disclosures risked undermining the political process. A memorandum reflecting this choice has been issued every four years by multiple attorneys general for a very long time, including in 2016.
Comeys actions, concluded Jamie Gorelick and Larry Thompson, were antithetical to the interests of justice, putting a thumb on the scale of this election and damaging our democracy.
Harry Reid, the outgoing Democratic leader in the Senate, has called for his staff to look into whether Comey had contravened the Hatch Act, which prohibits officials from using their authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies
