Greg Sargent explains.
As Jonathan Chait explains, Comey’s willingness to let such concerns influence these episodes reflects the success of a decades-long campaign by Republicans and GOP-aligned media to skew the political dialog by hyping fake scandals, which in this case led Comey to act to “avoid charges of favoritism,” thus willingly handing bad-faith actors leverage over law enforcement. It’s hard to read Comey’s NPR interview as anything other than confirmation of this. Worse, Comey also revealed that not allowing this to happen would have been a perfectly appropriate outcome.
All of this implicates the media’s conduct as well — both before and after the fact. Though Comey’s last-minute email revelation admittedly created a complicated editorial conundrum, it was widely hyped by the media in a manner that was surely disproportionate, given that at the time, no one knew whether the emails amounted to anything at all (which, it turned out, they didn’t). As Nate Silver has shown, the episode may have helped tip the election to Trump.
When supporters of Clinton made these points after the election, they were widely derided for being in denial about the real reasons Clinton lost. The notion that Comey and related over-the-top press coverage might have played an important role was greeted — including by some neutral reporters — as self-evidently, uproariously, knee-slappingly absurd, as if it constituted nothing more than hopeless partisan brainwashing.
It is true that Clinton lost for all kinds of other reasons, including her own role in emailgate, her flaws as a candidate, multiple strategic failures by the campaign and various unhealthy tendencies in the Democratic Party. But as Comey himself has now confirmed, the conduct for which he was responsible didn’t have to happen. Comey won’t allow himself to take this extra step, but his own retrospective testimony also confirms that it should not have happened. It likely helped Trump win, and to the degree that it did, it produced genuine institutional and systemic failure on multiple fronts. Comey’s media tour should lead us to forthrightly grapple with this — and to acknowledge that Clinton supporters are absolutely right to be bitterly angry over it to this day.
