Defending Clinton, Obama draws contrast with FBI’s Comey
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama staunchly defended Hillary Clinton’s use of private email as an “honest mistake,” suggesting Wednesday that voters should discount innuendo-filled revelations that the FBI is looking into more emails just ahead of Election Day.
Obama walked a careful line in his first public comments about FBI Director James Comey’s decision to publicly disclose the emails’ existence, which has roiled the campaign. Though he did not explicitly criticize Comey, Obama outlined a standard for how investigations should be conducted that contrasted sharply with the approach Comey has pursued.
“I do think that there is a norm that when there are investigations, we don’t operate on innuendo, we don’t operate on incomplete information, we don’t operate on leaks,” Obama said in an interview with online news outlet NowThis. “We operate based on concrete decisions that are made.”
Comey notified Congress in a brief and ambiguous letter last week that the FBI was examining whether newly uncovered emails might pertain to a dormant FBI probe into Clinton’s email practices. Comey’s letter shed no light on whether investigators were likely to actually turn up anything of note.