Republicans seized on that to argue that the FBI had shown that Clinton was unfit for the presidency, while simultaneously arguing that Clinton had benefited from an FBI cover up.

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2) The probe will look at Comey’s decision to notify Congress only days before the election that new emails that were potentially relevant to the previous investigation had been discovered. Not only did Trump and Republicans hype the living hell out of these revelations as proof that new evidence of her criminality had been discovered; many news organizations also hyped this information in an indefensible way.

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3) The investigation will also look at the question of whether a senior Justice official leaked information improperly to the Clinton campaign about a pending congressional hearing into her email set-up.

There’s been some Twitter speculation to the effect that once the Trump administration takes over, it can close this probe down. But the Inspector General is a “statutorily created independent entity,” and former Justice Department officials told me today that they saw this outcome as highly unlikely.

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“An Inspector General has very broad power to decide what to investigate,” Jamie Gorelick, a Washington litigator and former Deputy Attorney General, told me today. “That authority is not subject to the direction of an Attorney General. When I was Deputy Attorney General, I never felt I had the right to direct an Inspector General not to investigation something.”

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“They could fire the Inspector General, but that would be a Saturday Night Massacre situation,” added Matthew Miller, a former Justice Department spokesman who criticized Comey’s conduct at the time. “If so, you’d see resignations at the Justice Department. That would be a huge breakdown in the rule of law.”

Both the July press conference and the late October decision to notify Congress that new emails had been found came under scalding criticism. Some argued that the press conference broke FBI rules that preclude investigators from publicly criticizing someone against whom the agency had decided not to recommend charges. And when Comey notified Congress of the new emails, current and former Justice officials saw this as a break with Justice Department policies designed to prevent officials from interfering in elections.

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A finding by the Inspector General that Comey did act improperly in one or both of these cases would go some way towards vindicating this criticism.

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“If this investigation goes the way I suspect it will, it will codify what many people believe, which is that there is a stain on the FBI,” Miller, the former Justice spokesman, added. “If the IG issues an official finding, it will confirm what bipartisan former prosecutors said. Hopefully it will prevent future FBI directors and people at the Justice Department from breaking the rules during future elections.”

Comey’s conduct — and the question of whether it influenced the election — matter. There is some polling evidence that suggests that the last minute intervention by Comey might have cost Clinton the election. While it was so close that any number of individual things might have made the difference, Nate Silver has suggested Comey had a “large, measurable impact” on the race. Trump and Republicans have repeatedly scoffed at suggestions that Comey’s impact mattered, which suggest that they worry that such claims about the Comey intervention undercut perceptions of popular support for Trump. Note that Trump and his supporters like to say that he won by a landslide, which is complete nonsense.

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But in a way, the question of whether Comey’s conduct swung the election is not just unanswerable, but is also irrelevant to the question of whether his conduct was justified. A serious investigation into that conduct — whatever the impact on perceptions of the meaning of the election’s outcome — is desirable on its own. At a time when public confidence in the integrity of our democracy is being strained by all sorts of developments, this could bring about some sorely needed accountability, and make it less likely that such a thing happens again.

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UPDATE: Amy Jeffress, a former senior Justice Department official and currently an attorney at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer, emails more detail on whether this probe could be closed down under Trump: