FBI Director James Comey stood before the nation and issued a list of Hillary Clinton’s astounding wrongdoings Tuesday as regards America’s national security — and then said he was not recommending

prosecution because, in essence, what Mrs. Clinton did was “extremely careless” but not criminal.

As he spoke, I recalled F. Scott Fitzgerald’s peerless description in “The Great Gatsby” of a feckless wealthy couple: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into . . . their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Fitzgerald’s Tom and Daisy are pikers compared to Bill and Hillary. If one wishes to accept Comey’s contention that Mrs. Clinton is a careless but not criminal person, and one then considers her carelessness as a continuum with her husband’s careless conduct during his time in the Oval Office, then the Clintons have earned the dubious distinction of being the most outrageously careless couple this nation has ever known.

Say you are a Hillary supporter and believe she would be a good president, and say you believe Bill was a good president. You still must reckon with the damage they have done and will continue to do — damage to the good working order of the executive branch of government and damage to the American people’s view of politics and politicians.

Consider the event last week when Bill Clinton acted like Mrs. Kravitz on “Bewitched,” walking across the tarmac in Phoenix from his plane to Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s plane to borrow a cup of sugar.

This astonishing social call — paid by the husband of the subject of the nation’s most significant criminal investigation to the person called upon to make the final decision about that investigation — was practically designed to make everybody in America (save the most slavish of hackish apologists) think a fix was in.

If you think Bill Clinton’s action was innocent of any intent to pressure Lynch, the only possible defense for it is that Clinton — one of the most important and influential Americans of our age — is just unthinkably, unspeakably careless.

Indeed, in his role as a former president, he has a moral obligation to protect the good name of the United States. But then, he had that obligation as president and didn’t seem all that concerned about it then either.

He doesn’t think about the consequences of what he does. He just does it.

And that, too, is the only possible defense for Hillary Clinton’s conduct, as Comey intimated. She set up a private server that handled the communications of the secretary of state for her own purposes.

What Comey appears to want us to believe is that this was stupid and dangerous — and that she should have known it was wrong — but that it was not undertaken with criminal intent.

We’ll never know what her true purposes were, but there’s nothing in her or her husband’s behavior that could incline anyone (again, save an apologist) to think it was all just an innocent effort to protect herself in some way.

Comey’s press conference statement had a surreal tone — for after laying out what his mammoth investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information, he could just as easily have said he would recommend she be indicted.

Although he claimed no prosecutor would have looked at the evidence the FBI assembled and sought to try a case, he also declared, “This is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions.”

Reading between the lines, Comey was saying that were Hillary still serving, she would be fired and have her security clearance removed.

In short, the carelessness with which he tasked her so firmly is the very quality that saved her from criminal prosecution.

Like Fitzgerald’s Daisy, Hillary went and “smashed up things” — like America’s security — and “then retreated back into her vast carelessness.”

And if you had to bet, you’d bet on her being the next president of the United States. With her at the helm and her husband standing next to her, this country will be in very bad hands. The FBI director just told us so.