FBI director James Comey said this morning said he had to go public with Hillary Clinton’s emails because “I could not see a door labeled ‘no action here’,” saying he had to make a choice between speaking out which would be “really bad” with the election in 11 days or concealment which he said, “in my view, would be catastrophic.” He stoutly defended his decision to “walk into the world of ‘really bad’,” but call it “one of the world’s most painful choices.”
“Look, this is terrible. It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election,” Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee and viewers watching via cable news networks, PBS, livestreams, etc. “But honestly, it wouldn’t change the decision.”
In other testimony headlines:
Comey shot down President Donald Trump’s assertion China might have been behind the DNC hack during the election. In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, Trump said about the DNC hack, “If you don’t catch a hacker, okay, in the act, it’s very hard to say who did the hacking…Could have been China, could have been a lot of different groups.”
Asked about that assertion under oath, Comey said: We have high degree of intelligence that North Koreans hacked Sony and high confidence Russia hacked DNC.”
Comey said “I don’t know yet” if there is truth to Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani’s boasts he had a pipeline to the FBI during the investigation of Clinton’s emails. He added, “but if I found out there will be severe consequences” calling it “a matter I’m very very interested in.”
Comey also confirmed he had spoken to former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates about Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. “I did, the answer is yes” he told the committee, adding “I don’t know whether I can talk about it.” (Yates is set to testify to Congress next week as to when she alerted the Trump White House about her concerns on Flynn.)
Asked to explain what was the distinction between the activities of Wikileaks and news outlets that have been reporting on these abovementioned subjects, Comey described Wikileaks as “intelligence porn.”
Last time Comey testified in a hearing on the Hill, he confirmed the bureau was digging into whether the Trump campaign synched up with Russia’s work to affect the U.S. presidential election.
Clinton and Trump warmed up the media for Wednesday morning’s testimony. On Tuesday Clinton told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that Comey cost her the election. “I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28th and Russian Wikileaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off.” She credited Russian ruler Vladimir Putin with working like a beaver to nuke her campaign and help Trump’s, saying “if you chart my opponent and his campaign’s statements, they quite coordinated with the goals that that leader who shall remain nameless had.”
And, faster than you can say “of course he did!” Trump tweeted:
