Christiane Amanpour said Tuesday that Americans who chanted “lock her up!” in response to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s secret email server were engaging in a form of “hate speech.”

CNN’s chief international anchor was interviewing former FBI Director James B. Comey when the conversation veered to the 2016 presidential campaign. She asked him if, “in retrospect,” the FBI had found a way to “shut down that language.”

“Do you, in retrospect, wish that people like yourself — the FBI, I mean — the people in charge of law and order, had shut down that language — that it was dangerous potentially, that it could’ve created violence, that it’s kind of hate speech,” she asked. “Should that have been allowed?”

Mr. Comey rejected the premise of her question while simultaneously casting “shame” on Republicans who endorsed the rhetoric.

“That’s not the role for government to play,” he replied. “The beauty of this country is people can say what they want, even if it’s misleading and it’s demagoguery. The people who should have shut it down were Republicans who understand the rule of law and the values that they claim to stand for. Shame on them, but it wasn’t a role for government to play.”

Not mentioned in the interview was Mr. Comey’s nationally televised condemnation of Mrs. Clinton’s behavior on July 5, 2016, when he called her handling of the nation’s most sensitive intelligence “extremely careless.”

“Any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for [official conversations],” he said at the time.

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