Comey wasn’t satisfied with those results. In 2008, he was still complaining about the pardon in a letter to Congress.

The long investigation, the suspicion that something wasn’t right, but the final admission that not enough was discovered to file charges, mirrored the results of Comey’s investigations into Hillary Clinton’s email server. That investigation ended with the thundering—and extremely unusual—denunciation of Hillary Clinton in July in which Comey stated that the probe could not recommend Clinton's indictment.

The FBI director repeatedly said Clinton's use of the server did not rise to the level of criminal behavior because investigators were unable to amass any evidence that she had intended to mishandle classified information. The probe did reveal that some information marked classified at the time passed through her servers.

It’s almost difficult to remember now that two weeks out from the election, the discussion was not about whether Hillary Clinton would win, but if her win would be by such a margin as to generate a wave election, sweeping Republicans from the Senate and, just possibly, the House. The two candidates had polled about two points apart at the start of the month, but by the day before Comey released his letter telling Congress that the FBI was assessing new emails that could be "pertinent" to the investigation of Clinton’s email server, that margin was over five points and growing. Within a day, polling trends reversed and the margin shrank by 80%. Within two days, after the New York Times front page featured the Comey letter in every single story, and news channels ran little else, the margin was the closest it had been since the summer.

In an election where the “winner” lost the popular vote by over two percent, and took the electoral vote with a small number of votes across a bare handful of states, many factors can be deemed “decisive.” The false news stories planted by Russian sources. Clinton’s failure to visit states in the Upper Midwest. Wikileaks trickle of documents that kept a low-burning dissatisfaction smoking on the left.

But none of those things had the immediate, obvious, and visible effect of James Comey’s letter.

James Comey entered the FBI trying to harpoon Bill Clinton.