FBI Dir. James Comey: ‘It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election.” t.co/C1OKDyvELp
James Comey on Wednesday said that it makes him “mildly nauseous” to think that he might have had an impact on the 2016 presidential election while also defending his decision to brief Congress on a Hillary Clinton email probe.
During a hearing on Capitol Hill, Comey was questioned on why he decided to send a letter to Congress in late October saying that the FBI was looking into new emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop, even though none of these emails ended up being relevant to the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
Comey said that he was faced with two decisions: share the information with Congress or conceal it, and although both were bad choices, he and his entire staff felt that the only way forward was to share the information.
“It makes me mildly nauseous to think we might’ve had some impact on the election,” Comey said. “But honestly it wouldn’t change the decision.”
Comey went on to double down on the fact that he would still send that letter to Congress if he was faced with the same decision today and that he knew he could not be influenced by whether his actions might benefit anyone politically.
This comes one day after Hillary Clinton said in an interview that she would have won the election had James Comey not sent that letter to Congress at the end of October.