Imagine, for a moment, that you’re FBI director James Comey?

It’s 11 days before the most contentious, divisive, brutal election in US history.

Your department has been working for weeks on an investigation into criminal allegations surrounding a DailyMail.com scoop about Anthony Weiner sexting a 15-year-old girl.

They report to you that during the investigation, they have discovered a laptop containing over 650,000 emails.

It was a laptop shared between Weiner and his wife Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s right hand woman.

Imagine being James Comey. It’s 11 days before the most contentious, divisive, brutal election in history and you're told of a laptop containing over 650,000 emails that was shared by Huma and her sex pest husband. There was no easy choice

An inspection of the metadata of that laptop suggests ‘thousands’ of those emails were to and from Clinton’s now infamous private email server, some possibly containing classified information.

But you can’t read those emails without a warrant and if you seek that warrant, it will inevitably leak to the media.

What, if you’re Mr Comey, do you do?

After all, he told Congress he would alert them to any development which gave him good cause to reopen the original investigation into Clinton’s emails.

This, by any yardstick, was surely such a development?

Comey therefore had two choices.

He either waited until after the election next Tuesday before saying anything.

Or, he alerted Congress immediately.

Either way, public opprobrium lay.

If he waited, and Hillary won, and then it transpired there was stuff on this laptop which materially changes the findings of the original FBI investigation, all hell would have broken loose.

Donald Trump, already raging at a ‘rigged system’, would have exploded with fury and this time with very good reason.

The media, too, would have crucified both Comey and Clinton.

America’s new President would thus be instantly mired in a massive scandal of potentially impeachable proportions.

So instead, Comey went public with the information by writing to Congress revealing the existence of the laptop and the potential link to Clinton’s private email server.

Comey went public with the information that the investigation into Clinton's private email server had new potential evidence

He made it clear he didn’t know what was in the emails yet, but that they ‘appear to be pertinent’ to the original investigation.

That is self-evidently true.

If the metadata indicates ‘thousands’ of the new emails flowed to and from Clinton’s private server, and were written or received by her top aide, then of course they are ‘pertinent’ and of course they must be investigated.

This is not partisan politics at play, as the Democrats are screaming, this is perfectly normal and reasonable police work.

Comey knew that by going public, he’d be damned anyway.

The Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, explicitly forbids employees from interfering with elections and urges employees to avoid even the appearance of interfering with elections.

He concluded that the alternative option, supressing this information until after November 8 would be even worse, and I completely agree with him.

Of course, it’s important to note that the emails may NOT materially change the findings of the original investigation.

There might be nothing new in any of them.

Although, on the other hand, they might contain some of the tens of thousands emails that have mysteriously gone missing from the server.

And even if they don't, Huma still must answer whether her discredited and damaged husband - who was not even a lowly Clinton staffer - potentially had access to the private server.

Now Huma, seen here over the weekend after being pulled from trail, must answer whether her discredited and damaged husband had access to the private server

Nobody knows.

But how can anyone in a neutral political position not judge that they must be investigated, nor that they ‘seem pertinent’ to the original investigation?

How can anything be more ‘pertinent’ than the emergence of a new electronic device appearing to contain thousands of emails between Hillary and Huma, using the very private server that caused all the trouble in the first place?

So I don’t blame Comey at all. He had no choice.

When it comes to the blame game, I would suggest there are three people a lot more culpable.

First, Huma Abedin for not informing the FBI about this laptop during the original investigation. She apparently claims she didn’t know any of her emails were on it. Really? Well how the hell did they get there then?

Ms Abedin has very serious questions to answer here and if she has deliberately suppressed materially relevant evidence from the FBI then she could face very serious CRIMINAL questions.

Also to blame: Bill Clinton also pulled a ridiculous stunt with Loretta Lynch days before Comey’s verdict into the original investigation. Lynch had to basically recuse herself from the investigation, handing full responsibility to Comey

Second, former president Bill Clinton for that ridiculous stunt he pulled on Attorney General Loretta Lynch at a private airstrip in Phoenix days before Comey’s verdict into the original investigation. What on earth was he thinking compromising the integrity of the investigation in that way? People can make their own minds up but it stinks. The result of it, though, was that Lynch effectively recused herself from the investigation, handing full responsibility to Comey. If she hadn’t been forced to do that, then we may not be in this new situation.

But ultimately, the person most to blame for all this is Hillary Clinton.

Ultimately though, Hillary Clinton is the one who set up a private server and she's the one who exchanged classified information in emails on that server

She’s the one who deliberately set up a private email server while she was Secretary of State in flagrant breach of the rules of government email usage.

She’s the one who exchanged classified information in those emails. She’s the one who, when the balloon of this scandal went up, then deleted 33,000 of those emails, raising a huge cloud of suspicion over what they contained.

She’s the one who misled everyone repeatedly whenever she talked about this scandal.

Hillary Clinton made her secret email bed and she lied in it.

Now she is paying the consequences and it may cost her the White House.