Federal Bureau of Investigations/flickr

Matthew Miller is right when he says that this is infuriating.

This Oct. 5 email from Comey to Brennan and Clapper on publicly acknowledging Russian interference is infuriating. pic.twitter.com/DFK7iiuZoR — Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) June 14, 2018

But couple that with the fact that 23 days later, on October 28th, Comey sent a letter to Congress announcing that the Clinton email investigation had been re-opened. Apparently, the windows hadn’t closed for an official statement on that one.

There are two other ways Comey could have gone. He could have applied his standard on the Trump/Russia investigation to the one about Clinton’s emails and not announced either one. Or, he could have made statements about both of them. But he chose the lopsided route that gave Trump a pass and hurt Clinton. Data guru Nate Silver documented the results.

Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28. The letter, which said the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state, upended the news cycle and soon halved Clinton’s lead in the polls, imperiling her position in the Electoral College.

My view is that Comey didn’t do this out of malice for Clinton and certainly doesn’t have any love lost for Trump. It’s much more complicated than that, which is why the IG report is right to say that, “we did not find that these decisions were the result of political bias on Comey’s part,” but “by departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice.”