Don't blame Comey for this mess

I can’t imagine that Comey wanted these emails to pop up now. I am sure he would have preferred that he and his team had access to these emails during the initial investigation many months ago when the FBI was interviewing top-level Clinton staffers. But these emails, for whatever reason, were not provided to the investigators then and were only discovered during a separate, presumably unrelated, investigation. Comey didn’t go looking for new information, it came to him.

And what was Comey supposed to do with this new, potentially relevant information? Ignore it? Tell his staff he would look into it later, when it was more politically and personally convenient to do so? No, I think the obvious answer is that he had to deal with this information the minute it was brought to his attention. That’s what he did…

Once Comey made the decision that he needed to look into these emails, was he supposed to keep it a secret? Perhaps that would have been consistent with department policy in a traditional investigation, but this investigation has been anything but traditional. Having publicly stated in June that the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server was complete, it makes perfect sense that he would want to let Congress know he was just made aware of previously undiscovered evidence that may be relevant to that investigation. Although this development doesn’t make his earlier testimony before Congress untruthful, it is certainly inconsistent with it.