‘Given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression …” FBI director James Comey’s extraordinarily disingenuous letter to Congress has been like a hand grenade thrown into the final days of the US presidential election. “Of course we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations,” he admitted to FBI staff. Indeed.
His intervention came just as it appeared the election was almost over, and the main interest was beginning to switch to whether Democrats could also capture Congress on the coat-tails of a resounding Hillary Clinton victory.
But Comey has reopened the race, and with no more than an innuendo of impropriety. Against the strong advice of Department of Justice officials and departmental guidelines that caution against talking about current criminal probes or being seen as meddling in elections. And with what? No charges. No news of a criminal conviction. Not even a reopening of an official investigation, as Donald Trump enthusiastically bragged. Simply an investigation that might lead to a formal investigation into some emails that may be linked to the Clinton investigation. Not even, reports suggest, emails from Clinton herself, but belonging to aide Huma Abedin, and which have not even been read. Just 11 days to go .
For the Trump campaign this is manna from heaven. The merest hint that an investigation is on is amplified outrageously into proof of guilt of criminality on a massive scale, not just to undermine US security, but, he alleges, to conceal her illegal other activities. For which there has been not one iota of evidence uncovered to date, despite exhaustive trawling by the FBI through millions of emails. And despite the agency’s earlier verdict that Clinton’s email practices (initially rashly encouraged by her predecessor at the State Department Colin Powell) although “extremely careless” did not warrant prosecution .
Trump has been assisted by the persistence in the public debate of a largely unchallenged false equivalence between her “offences” and his. In part, a function of Trump’s brazen willingness to repeat wild claims ad nauseam; in part, of a media, particularly broadcasting, in which spurious notions of “fairness” and “balance” meant an inability to confront outright lies.
Polls before Comey’s letter showed Clinton with a six-point lead, an edge somewhat smaller than earlier in the month – they were yesterday barely three percentage points apart. Pollsters caution that although it has injected a new uncertainty, that previous bombshells – of which there have been a few on both sides – may have moved the polls, but none fundamentally reshaped the race. The email news could matter most, however, in crucial down-ballot races. The Democratic recapture of Congress may be slipping away.