Comey, Clinton and This Steaming Mess
 Frank Bruni

“Bigger than Watergate!” Donald Trump exulted about the discovery of new emails from Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state. Sure, they could be. They could also be pleas from Clinton that Huma Abedin fetch her a skinny latte from Starbucks. We don’t know. And the horrifying thing is that the F.B.I. director, James Comey, didn’t seem to know, either, even as he disclosed their existence to the world.

How strange but how fitting. This entire election is being conducted in the key of hysteria, and Comey just found a way to amplify that ugly music.

Listen, Clinton made an awful decision in setting up a private email server, then compounded that error by dragging her feet through defensive non-apologies that gave the story such legs. Now she limps to the finish line when she should be hitting full stride.

But Trump is as much of a part and player in this latest chapter of the email saga, because of the one-syllable grenade that he keeps lobbing at the body politic, his furious mantra over these final weeks.

“Rigged,” “rigged,” “rigged.” Many Americans have come to believe that. Many others are rightly determined to prove to that group how wrong they are, or at least not to add accelerant to the wildfire.

And so all of us, including Comey, operate in a befouled atmosphere, tailoring our actions to it.

Comey obviously felt that he was in a bind and clearly believed that by disclosing the emails as soon as possible — and not, say, delaying until he had some sense of what the F.B.I. was dealing with — he had the best chance of avoiding any possible charges of a cover-up later, and was acting with the cleanest conscience.

But his desire to be a Boy Scout may have eclipsed sound judgment here, and rectitude is a quaint, shortsighted notion in an election this rife with accusations of bias, this primed for scandal, this frenzied.

Were the emails in question sent to or from Clinton? Comey didn’t and perhaps couldn’t say. What about them warranted inspection? Again, he had nothing to offer.

He told F.B.I. employees in a memo that he was hoping, with his announcement, not “to create a misleading impression” of some hugely significant discovery. But that’s exactly and predictably what he did.

Most Democrats were outraged. “Mr. Comey said he was duty bound to inform Congress,” Bob Kerrey, the former senator and governor, told me. “Quite the opposite is the case. He was duty bound to make an announcement after he completes his examination of the emails.“

Indeed, he broke with the longstanding F.B.I. policy of not commenting on ongoing investigations. He also defied the wishes of senior officials in the Department of Justice, according to various news reports early Saturday afternoon. And he frustrated everyone — conservatives, liberals, Trump, Clinton — because his disclosure was all questions, no answers.

Regardless, the media went nuts, declaring that the development could bend the shape of the race and assuming damage to Clinton without any polling or other evidence to back that up.

“We don’t know what this means yet except that it’s a real bombshell,” the journalist Carl Bernstein said in a phone interview on CNN on Friday, adding: “It is unthinkable that the director of the F.B.I. would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to the Congress of the United States saying there is more information out there about classified emails and call it to the attention of Congress unless it was something requiring serious investigation.” A viewer couldn’t see him licking his chops but could hear it.

Even the many news organizations that stressed the possible innocuousness of the emails and emphasized how very little we knew contradicted that caution with the length, number and front-and-center placement of their stories about this development.

Why? The Politico writer Glenn Thrush had a thought, expressed in this tweet:

 
 Glenn Thrush ✔ @GlennThrush
What % of the 'bombshell' coverage of the Huma/Anthony email thing the result of Trump/Breitbart psy-ops on 'rigged' media?
:

 
 Glenn Thrush ✔ @GlennThrush
The Rigged Media is really eating this up

Nate Silver, the editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight, sagely added these brush strokes to that portrait:

28 Oct
 Nate Silver ✔ @NateSilver538
Key thing to look at is whether Clinton's vote share declines from current ~46%. If Trump's vote rises, may not have to do with FBI stuff.
 
 Nate Silver ✔ @NateSilver538
The FBI story also broke at the exact time when the media was eager for a dramatic twist/complication in the "Clinton coasts" narrative.
8:00 PM - 28 Oct 2016
  1,496 1,496 Retweets   2,700 2,700 likes

How is this supposed to play out? If, a few days from now, the F.B.I. determines and announces that none of the emails contain classified information or anything else of concern, will Trump and Clinton’s other enemies conceivably believe that? Hah! They’ll be shouting “rigged” all over again. They’ll be shouting it louder than ever.

It wouldn’t be normal practice for the F.B.I., in an effort to buttress its determination, to release the emails, many of which are presumably private communications of Abedin’s. And those might be too intimate for her to make public herself. But now that Comey has flagged the whole batch of them, suspicion will never die.

And if the emails are fresh cause for concern, will that be knowable, and digestible, before Nov. 8? On this point, too, we’re all in the dark.

What a steaming mess, and that’s a comment partly on this specific situation but also on this election, which has devolved into a junkyard of innuendo, lies and conspiracy theories. Trump doesn’t bear all the blame for that, but he bears an ample share of it.

On the subject of conspiracy theories, I can offer some comic relief, noting that he and Rush Limbaugh couldn’t get on the same page about the new emails on Friday.

Even as Trump was praising Comey and saying that the election might not be quite as rigged as he’d feared, Limbaugh was telling his listeners that Comey was “just doing this to take everybody’s attention off of the WikiLeaks email dump” that was embarrassing Clinton and her aides.


“The cynical view,” he said, “is that Comey is still carrying water for Clinton and is trying to get everybody to stop paying attention on the WikiLeaks dump because it’s starting to have an impact.”

Let me get this straight: The crooked F.B.I. and the corrupt media throw just enough dirt at Clinton so that she’s sure to track it into the Oval Office? Thank God for Limbaugh. God help the rest of us.