FBI Director Comey threw a kind of IED into the presidential campaign the week before Election Day -- suggesting there might be more Hillary emails. What's the best he can do to minimize the impact of this mistake? Here are a few suggestions.

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Hillary's New Emails: A Solution for FBI Director Comey

F.B.I. agents are all but certain that it [their review of newly-found Huma Abedin-Hillary Clinton emails] will not be completed by Election Day, and believe it will take at least several weeks."

Michael S. Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo, "10 Questions (and Answers) About New Email Trove,"The New York Times, October 31, 2016, p. A15.

FBI Director James B. Comey has created a bit of a mess.

Here's how he might get out of it.

The FBI's investigation of Hillary Clinton's treatment of classified emails as Secretary of State was wrapped up in July. Comey announced that while her procedures were "extremely careless," she had neither the requisite criminal intention, nor was there any other reason, to proceed with her prosecution.

One of Hillary's closest aides, Huma Abedin, was married to Congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner, formerly infamous for sending women lewd pictures of himself, is now being investigated by the FBI for doing so with a 15 year old girl. As a product of that investigation, it appears that in addition to whatever else he may have had on his computer, there were some of Huma Abedin's emails -- possibly including email exchanges between her and Hillary Clinton.

Department of Justice practice is to not reveal details of ongoing criminal investigations, and not to make announcements that might affect the outcome of a political campaign within 60 days of Election Day. Comey, having made a commitment to members of Congress to keep them informed of developments regarding Clinton's classified emails, informed them -- 11 days before the presidential Election Day -- of the possibility there might be more emails as a result of the Weiner investigation. Apparently Weiner's computer, containing some 600,000 emails, had been sometimes shared with his wife.

At the time, Comey's FBI didn't even have a search warrant authorizing their access to Huma Abedin's emails. (Now they have one.) Apparently he had not even seen any of the relevant emails, let alone made a judgment about what problems they did, or did not, raise.

Given the role throughout the 2015-16 presidential campaign of what Senator Bernie Sanders once famously described as "Hillary's damned emails," it could have been predicted that Comey's rekindling this fire, raising suspicions without a soupçon of facts, would have the impact on the election's outcome that is already showing up. Talk about an "October surprise!"

What's worse, as the opening quote reports, the FBI is saying it's unlikely there will be any facts prior to Election Day.

So what's to be done? Don't insist, for now, that the excellent must be permitted to be the enemy of the good.

1. Do a quick search of the emails. Microsoft Outlook, and most other email programs, have a search feature. It's something I often use, and it's incredibly fast. If Google can search through billions of documents in less than a second, there's no reason why searching through 600,000 emails should take "several weeks."

2. How do Hillary and Abedin refer to each other in emails -- first name, full name, initials, title, code names? Do they always do so? Pull out every email that contains those identifiers -- whether in the text, to, from, or subject fields.

3. Then search those emails for words that might identify a classified email -- secret, top secret, confidential, C, eyes only, classified. Compare those with the classified emails of Secretary Clinton that the FBI has already investigated and remove the duplicates.

4. Print out and divide the remainder, if any, among however many FBI agents are necessary to get those emails read and evaluated within 24 hours (preferably agents formerly involved in the investigation of the Secretary's emails).

5. If nothing is discovered that significantly adds or subtracts from what was known in July, have Director Comey issue a statement something like the following:

I apologize to the American public, the Congress, and the presidential campaigns for any confusion that I may have created by my recent report to Congressional leaders regarding what we thought might be additional emails relevant to our previous investigation of former Secretary of State Clinton. My prior commitments to Congress required that I make some report as soon as I became aware of this development. It was certainly not my intention, nor that of the Bureau, to affect the election in any way.

In that spirit, I wish to announce that our preliminary evaluation of the newly discovered emails, some of which were duplicates, indicates that they will add nothing new to what we knew in July.

While we will continue to evaluate them more closely, I wanted to make clear that at this time it does not appear that we will be altering the advice we provided the Department of Justice at that time.

Of course, from the Clinton campaign's perspective this risks that disclosing what the initial search reveals might be much more damaging than what's now in the media -- and Trump's speeches.

And then there's always Comey's option to simply resign -- either explaining, or not, whatever pressures may have been applied to him that caused him to do this.

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Nicholas Johnson of Iowa City formerly held positions in Washington and now blogs at FromDC2Iowa and here at OpEdNews.

#AnthonyWeiner, #Congress, #DepartmentOfJustice, #emails, #FBI, #HillaryClinton, #HumaAbedin, #JamesComey, #PresidentialElection

Authors Website: http://nicholasjohnson.org

Authors Bio:

Nicholas Johnson is best known for his tumultuous seven-year term as a Federal Communications Commission commissioner (1966-1973), while publishing How to Talk Back to Your Television Set, 400 separate FCC opinions, and appearing on a Rolling Stone Cover.

He's also served as a law professor; public interest advocate; administrator, manager and corporate representative; author, columnist, public lecturer, TV and radio performer; politician; and lawyer -- with experience in public health, media, computer and telecommunications policy.

A native Iowan, Johnson holds undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Texas, Austin. Following law school, where he was Order of the Coif and articles editor of the Texas Law Review, he clerked for both Judge John R. Brown, US Court of Appeals, 5th Circuit, and Justice Hugo L. Black, United States Supreme Court. His first professorship was at the University of California Law School, Berkeley (Boalt Hall). He later was an associate at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington & Burling, from which he was appointed U.S. Maritime Administrator by President Lyndon B. Johnson (no relation).

Following his FCC term, he served President Jimmy Carter as a presidential advisor for the White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services. He has also been a candidate for Congress in an Iowa Democratic primary, chair of a Washington-based media reform group, host of his PBS TV program, author of a nationally syndicated column, consultant to numerous countries on media matters, and appeared at hundreds of colleges as a public lecturer.

In 1981 he returned to Iowa City, served as Co-director of the University of Iowa's Institute for Health, Behavior and Environmental Policy, a member of the school board of the Iowa City Community School District, and accepted a position at the University of Iowa College of Law where he taught media and cyberlaw from 1981 until retiring from teaching in 2015 but still retains his office.

In 2009, Nicholas Johnson was selected as one of roughly 700 individuals described by Yale University Press as "leading figures in the history of American law, from the colonial era to the present day" in The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law.

He is the author of 8 books, and maintains an active Web page and blog.