Lewandowski: FBI director acted as 'judge and jury' on Clinton

Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s fired campaign manager, ripped FBI Director James Comey for acting as “the judge and the jury” in his handling of the bureau’s probe of Hillary Clinton’s email habits.

On Tuesday, Comey said that while Clinton and her aides had been “extremely careless” with her handling of classified materials through her private server, “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring the case against the former secretary of state.


Trump has avoided directly criticizing Comey, a Republican appointed as deputy attorney general by President George W. Bush. But Lewandowski went after him Wednesday morning during a CNN panel with New York state Democratic official Christine Quinn.

“I think the director’s job was not to say that a prosecutor would not move forward with the case, which is what he said. His job, as the director of the FBI, is to lay out the case to the best of their ability, to view the investigative work and then turn it over to the prosecution for the prosecutor to determine,” Lewandowski said.

During a rally Tuesday night in Raleigh, North Carolina, Trump remarked upon a recent New York Times story in which Democratic sources said Clinton could decide to retain Loretta Lynch as attorney general. “That’s like a bribe, isn’t it? Isn’t that sort of a bribe?” Trump asked. “I think it’s a bribe.”

Trump took to Twitter early Wednesday morning to continue his verbal assault on the presumptive Democratic nominee.

“Crooked Hillary Clinton and her team ‘were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.’ Not fit!” Trump tweeted, quoting Comey’s statement. He added, “Crooked Hillary has once again been proven to be a person who is dishonest, incompetent and of very bad judgement.”

Former prosecutor and New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who backs Trump, trashed Comey on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” calling it a “no-brainer” to prosecute under the statutory definition of the law.

“If you read the first three-quarters of his report, it says indict. Lie after lie after lie. You know what you use lies for in a criminal trial? To prove intent. Destruction of 34,000 emails. That’s a smoking gun. I never had a case where somebody destroyed 34,000 emails,” said Giuliani, who served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1983 to 1989 and as associate attorney general from 1981 to 1983.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) told MSNBC that he spoke with Comey right after his announcement, asking him a series of questions for which he did not receive answers. He later condensed those queries into a letter, he said.





Goodlatte said several people have been prosecuted under similar circumstances, such as Chief Petty Officer Lyle White, who pleaded guilty to mishandling classified documents under a statute that Comey considered in the Clinton investigation. However, as POLITICO has reported, cases that have led to charges included aggravating circumstances that were likely not present in Clinton’s case.

Clinton had few surrogates making her case on television, although longtime friend Lanny Davis appeared on “Fox & Friends” to defend her.

“The FBI said that she did nothing illegal and that [Comey] had no knowledge of compromise or hacking into her emails,” Davis said. “He said it was possible, but there is no knowledge. And with no illegality and no knowledge of any harm, then she’s left with saying I made a mistake. Which she has said many, many times.”

While Comey has said that he regularly makes recommendations on cases, Lewandowski said he does not do them publicly, as was the case with Tuesday’s surprise news conference.

“I don’t think anybody’s ever seen an FBI director come out and have a press conference like what we saw yesterday or say there’s no belief in his own mind that a prosecutor would move forward with that case,” Lewandowski said. “I think it’s the job of the FBI to do the research and then present it to the prosecutors for their consideration to determine if they’re going to move forward, and what they’re doing instead is, he has become the judge and the jury.”

Comey cannot say that “from his perspective,” Lewandowski added, saying it should be “up to the prosecutor to move forward or not.”

