FBI Director James Comey “is a particularly infuriating character,” former Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri said Wednesday on MSNBC. | AP Photo Palmieri: Comey only cares about 'protecting his own reputation'

Jennifer Palmieri, communications director for Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential bid, described FBI Director James Comey as a “particularly infuriating character” on Wednesday and argued that he cares about “protecting his own reputation” above all else.

“Comey is a particularly infuriating character, and I think what he has always been about, from when he was the deputy attorney general under President Bush, is about protecting his own reputation,” she said on MSNBC.


Former Clinton campaign aides have argued that Comey is largely to blame for their candidate’s stunning loss in the November election.

The FBI director reignited the controversy over Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state just over a week before the election, when he took the unusual step of announcing that intelligence officials were looking through materials that may have been pertinent to the case. He sent another letter a few days before Election Day saying that those materials had not changed the bureau’s decision not to charge Clinton with a crime.

Now, Comey is again under scrutiny. He recently asked the Department of Justice to rebut President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated allegation that former President Barack Obama ordered an illegal wiretap of his phone lines during the presidential campaign, but Comey made the request in private, not in public.

Some Clinton allies have accused Comey of hypocrisy for handling the Clinton case in public but this Trump controversy, as well as the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s attempts to meddle in the election, in private.

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Palmieri also said Wednesday that she suspects that Trump’s campaign did collude with Russia, or at least the website WikiLeaks, on cyberattacks on Democratic Party officials that embarrassed the Clinton campaign.

James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, has said that intelligence officials had not found any evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia when he was still serving in government, and the Trump campaign has denied any such misconduct.

“Just as somebody who lived through that campaign, I do believe that there was probably collusion,” Palmieri said. “At least between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. … The Trump campaign was just way too ready to jump on whatever leak happened each day. They clearly had their statement ready to go every time there was the leak du jour in the morning from John Podesta’s email accounts.”