Comey calls 2016 election decisions ‘nightmare I can’t awaken from’
The 2020 election is just eight months away, U.S. intelligence says Russia is again trying to influence the outcome, and the president is ousting senior justice, national security, and intelligence officials in favor of political loyalists. Yet it was the FBI’s investigation in 2016 into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified emails and the Trump campaign’s alleged coordination with Russia during the election that audience members couldn’t hear enough about from James Comey, the former FBI director, during an Institute of Politics talk Monday evening at Harvard Kennedy School’s JFK Jr. Forum. Moderator Eric Rosenbach, M.P.P. ’04, a former cyber expert at the Pentagon and former chief of staff to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter from 2015 to 2017, pressed Comey to explain to the capacity crowd why the bureau’s Trump campaign probe, which began in late July 2016, was kept secret from voters while Comey reported on the Clinton inquiry’s status that...