Comey has no regrets about probe
FBI director confident in inquiry’s handling
WASHINGTON — FBI Director James Comey gave his most exhaustive defense yet Wednesday of his role in politically sensitive investigations, telling a Senate panel that despite feeling “mildly nauseous’’ at the thought his decisions about a probe into Hillary Clinton might have affected the election outcome, he had no regrets.
He also said he was confident in the FBI’s handling of an ongoing probe of any contacts between Russian officials and associates of President Donald Trump.
Through nearly four hours of sometimes combative questioning from Democrats and Republicans, Comey offered his most full-throated explanation of his actions to date, and he never wavered from his core contention — that the FBI has stayed above the political fray even as its investigators probed senior aides to both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates.
“Lordy, has this been painful,” he said. “I’ve gotten all kinds of rocks thrown at me and this has been really hard, but I think I’ve done the right thing at each turn.”
Comey appeared to win few new converts to his way of thinking, given the intense partisanship still swirling around both the now-closed probe of Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, and the current investigation into whether any Trump associates may have coordinated with Russian officials to interfere with the election campaign.
After the hear- ing, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said he was unswayed and that he still believed Comey did the wrong thing by telling Congress days before the election that he was reopening the Clinton probe to examine thousands of emails found on the laptop of a spouse of a senior Clinton aide.
“I would have been satisfied if he had done what all Republican and Democratic administrations have done in the past,” Leahy said. “The Justice Department has a procedure. You do not release information like that just before an election.”
In defending his decisions, Comey offered some new details about what FBI agents found last fall, after they realized a laptop belonging to former New York congressman Anthony Weiner contained thousands of work emails involving Clinton. At the time, Weiner was married to Huma Abedin, who was a senior aide to Clinton. Agents were looking at Weiner’s laptop because he was under investigation for possibly inappropriate communications with a minor.
“Somehow, her emails were being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information,’’ Comey said, adding later, “His then-spouse Huma Abedin appears to have had a regular practice of forwarding emails to him for him to print out for her so she could deliver them to the secretary of state.”
After Comey notified Congress of the Weiner laptop issue on Oct. 28, the Justice Department got a search warrant to examine some 3,000 messages that were work-related, Comey said. Of those, agents found a dozen that contained classified information, but they were messages investigators had already seen.