Rep. Jerrold Nadler, New York Democrat, said FBI Director James B. Comey’s 11th-hour announcements about Hillary Clinton’s emails may have cost her the election, and he called on President Obama to fire Mr. Comey immediately.

“What Jim Comey did was so highly improper and wrong, from the very beginning in July,” Mr. Nadler said Monday on CNN’s “New Day.”

“He was putting his thumb on the scales right then, and it’s unforgivable for a police agency to opine, frankly, publicly, about legal conduct,” he said.

“And then to send that letter when he had nothing to say, violating the guidelines that you don’t comment on an ongoing investigation — you don’t intervene in an election within 60 days — may very well have cost her the election,” Mr. Nadler said.

“But whether it did or not, it was unforgivable as a political intervention by the police into the election, and the people in the FBI who were leaking to [former New York City Mayor] Rudy Giuliani through former agents or not — that was also clearly illegal,” he said.

“The president ought to fire Comey immediately, and he ought to initiate an investigation,” he said.

“That may be why she lost. It certainly hurt,” Mr. Nadler said.

Mr. Nadler was apparently referring to comments from Mr. Giuliani, a top Trump surrogate, in which Mr. Giuliani said ahead of the election on Fox News that “you’re darn right I heard about it.”

He later said on CNN he was referring to “consternation within the FBI” over the situation and that Mr. Comey’s letter was a surprise to him.

In July, Mr. Comey announced that Mrs. Clinton and her aides acted carelessly with her email set-up but declined to recommend criminal charges for mishandling classified information.

On Oct. 28, Mr. Comey disclosed to Congress that the bureau found emails that appeared to be pertinent to its investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails. Then on the Sunday before the election, he said the bureau had not changed its conclusions from July.

Some Republicans have said Mrs. Clinton has only herself to blame for the situation, and that she could have headed off anything approaching what Mr. Comey had announced had she used a traditional state.gov email address and a server that wasn’t run out of her own home to do government business.

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