emptywheel

still wasn’t Comey’s call to make. Hard to get past that one.

Sure. But his call was in July, not in October, and was triggered by a series of other gross and mostly forgotten errors which had damaged the public perception that the FBI could reach an impartial and apolitical conclusion.

Not forgotten by me. None of them justified his making the call on his own or, even worse, passing judgment on Clinton’s conduct. And then Oct was a whole other chain of mistakes.

All of the options at his disposal in July were terrible. But the October letter was a nothing-burger softball designed to insulate President Clinton from a disaster when she became President, and the campaign then fell into Chafetz' trap by playing it in a completely insane way.

Similarly, consider what it looks like for Dir FBI to say "no charges, no comment" days after AG meets Bill on a plane.

This is a longer convo but it’s not true that he did the first presser because of the plane incident. Planned it all along without telling DOJ. Goal was more than just avoiding a bad option, it was furthering the St Jim thing (which he probably believes).

Too long for twitter maybe, but I think this boils down to DOJ can't investigate high-profile politicians without a special counsel in a modern partisan environment, and Comey tried to straddle that gap and fell down the middle.