Throughout the day, it was apparent to the FBI representatives that if the attorney general or the deputy attorney general felt that strongly, either should pick up the phone or visit Comey and order him not to send the letter. Of course, they were concerned that Comey might go public with the order and, whether he did or did not, that the order would leak to members of Congress, and the attorney general and/or deputy attorney general would be hauled up before congressional committees, accused of obstruction of justice, and perhaps be the subject of an FBI criminal investigation. That was implied by some of those representing the FBI director, but never explicitly. But it certainly worried those representing the Office of the Attorney General. Leaks again! Everyone was worried about leaks . . . and politics . . . and political and legal consequences.
The ultimate irony is that I have heard from both sides that had it even once occurred to Attorney General Lynch or Deputy Attorney General Yates or James Comey that the writing of a vague letter to Congress would cause Donald Trump to win the election, everyone would have acted differently. Lynch and Yates would have ordered Comey not to send the letter, and if he made a public fuss or there were leaks, “to hell with it,” as one person close to Yates told me. The New York Times wrote a comprehensive narrative about these discussions in April 2017, and one of Comey’s top advisers, Michael Steinbach, is on the record saying as much, that they didn’t think the letter would have the effect of electing Trump.
Even President Barack Obama reportedly would have acted differently had he imagined that withholding the information he had about Russian hacking intentionally aimed at helping Trump be elected president would enable Trump to win the election. It has been reported that Comey wanted to write about the dangers of Russia’s interference in the election in an op-ed but was talked out of it by the Obama White House for fear that Trump would add force to his political argument that the election was “rigged” against him. In a postelection analysis, the Washington Post quoted White House advisers to Obama expressing regret for his decision not to go public with the facts about Russian meddling in the election on behalf of Trump. Had Obama actually thought there was any chance of Trump winning the election, insiders have suggested, he would never have made such a decision. “I feel like we sort of choked,” said someone from the Obama White House.2
So each player in this drama made his or her own calculations to be risk averse—the attorney general and deputy attorney general not to order Comey not to send the letter; Comey to send the letter; and Obama not to publicize what he knew about the pro-Trump Russian hacking and meddling in the election—all because they didn’t think Trump had a chance. By being so risk averse, they took the greatest risk of all, at least to those who believe Trump’s election was a setback for America.
Meanwhile, Comey ordered his FBI team to work around-the-clock reviewing all of Huma Abedin’s emails to determine whether there was anything in them that might affect his earlier judgment that Clinton had not committed a prosecutable offense. They found the task of going through six hundred thousand-odd emails less daunting than they had anticipated and less time-consuming as well. They did a simple keyword search to narrow the number down to fifty thousand emails that had Hillary Clinton’s name or State Department email addresses and her name associated. From those, they narrowed down a final search to around three thousand that conceivably might have contained classified information and might not have been reviewed before. Within several days, they determined definitively that only about a dozen or so had arguably classified information, but none of those were marked classified; and more important, all had been previously seen and digested when the nonprosecution recommendation was made and announced on July 5.
As reported by the New York Times, in the wee hours of the morning on Saturday, November 6, 2016, the agents in New York had reached a conclusion: Nothing new here. Comey was informed about 6 A.M. Several hours later, he wrote his letter and released it to the public to announce the nonresults:
November 6, 2016
Dear Messrs. Chairmen:
I write to supplement my October 28, 2016 letter that notified you the FBI would be taking additional investigative steps with respect to former Secretary of State Clinton’s use of a personal email server. Since my letter, the FBI investigative team has been working around the clock to process and review a large volume of emails from a device obtained in connection with an unrelated criminal investigation. During that process, we reviewed all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State.
Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.
I am very grateful to the professionals at the FBI for doing an extraordinary amount of high-quality work in a short period of time.
Sincerely yours,
James B. Comey
Director
Comey would now experience his ultimate nightmare. He could have said as much by simply writing:
Dear all:
Oops. We never should have written the October 28 letter. Sorry.
Sincerely,
James Comey
And then he could have gone to the forest and watched a tree falling with only him there noticing. Because his letter was too little, too late.
Indeed, the chairman of the Clinton campaign, John Podesta, stated that Comey’s November 6 letter hurt Clinton because it put the word “emails” back into the news for the last two days before Election Day.
In any event, the Trump campaign and most Republicans on the stump for Trump ignored the letter entirely, with Trump leading the cheers “Lock her up” as if the FBI had never recommended no prosecution and as if the October 28 letter had not turned out to be about nothing. “Lock her up” was the emblem of the Trump campaign’s utter disregard for the truth or facts, and unfortunately, the audiences that chanted down to the last night before Election Day seemed convinced that he was right and that the FBI was part of the “rigged” system that Trump had claimed as the reason he might lose.
We now know that Trump and most of his campaign expected him to lose. But there were stirrings somewhere that the collapsing numbers of Hillary Clinton voters, especially in the key states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, might . . . just might . . . lead to a miracle for Trump when all the votes were in.
So now we turn to the hard data. And the data is clear. But for Comey’s October 28 letter, Hillary Clinton would have been elected president, and by a substantial margin.
* * *
*. The letter was copied to the ranking Democrats of each committee—a total of sixteen members of Congress. Comey actually suggested during his May 3, 2017, hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was surprised it leaked. That seems hard to comprehend.
CHAPTER EIGHT
* * *
Comey’s Letter Elects Donald Trump
There are four ways to measure the negative effects on Clinton’s standing during the time period from immediately after the letter was published through Election Day: (1) media coverage—quantitatively and qualitatively; (2) substantial increases in negative “feelings” or sentiments toward Clinton; (3) abrupt declines in national popular vote polls; and (4) even more severe declines in polls of the key battleground states.
All four of these effects of the Comey letter are proven by multiple sources of data. The evidence and the data show, conclusively, that but for the Comey letter, Hillary Clinton wins the presidency.
1. The Comey letter triggered overwhelmingly negative and dominant media stories about Clinton in the closing days of the election.
Most Americans still at least hazily remember the shock wave of media that broke soon after the arrival of the Comey letter in the offices of twenty-four members of Congress a little before 1 P.M. on October 28. Within minutes—surprise!—news of the letter was posted in a tweet, and mischaracterized, by the highly partisan anti-Clinton Republican chair of the House Oversight Co
mmittee, Utah’s Jason Chaffetz. His tweet said, inaccurately: “case reopened.”
The media went into hysteria mode. BREAKING NEWS scrolled across every cable news screen. Front pages of news websites and the next day’s newspapers screamed out warnings about a “new” Clinton emails investigation, some using the word “criminal.”
Probably—and predictably—the worst and most inaccurate, irresponsible headline and article came from FoxNews.com: “Hillary Clinton’s Criminal Investigation: A ‘Constitutional Crisis’ Like Watergate.”
That headline came from comments made by a former pollster of President Jimmy Carter, Pat Caddell. Also in the story was a comment from a veteran Democratic pollster, Doug Schoen, who cohosted an online Fox program with Caddell and said that he was reconsidering his support of Clinton because if she were elected, there would be a constitutional crisis.
Nate Silver wrote on FiveThirtyEight about the media coverage immediately after the letter was leaked: “The story exploded onto the scene; Fox News was treating Chaffetz’s tweet as ‘breaking news’ within 15 minutes, and the FBI story dominated headlines everywhere within roughly an hour.”1
The number of Google hits on all the negative words that consistently depressed Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers throughout the campaign—“emails,” “investigation,” “FBI”—shot up. For example, just the terms “Clinton FBI” and “Clinton email” increased fiftyfold and almost tenfold respectively within a day.
Silver continued,
Few news organizations gave the story more velocity than The New York Times. On the morning of Oct. 29, Comey stories stretched across the print edition’s front page, accompanied by a photo showing Clinton and her aide Huma Abedin, Weiner’s estranged wife. Although some of these articles contained detailed reporting, the headlines focused on speculation about the implications for the horse race—“NEW EMAILS JOLT CLINTON CAMPAIGN IN RACE’S LAST DAYS.”
The Times gave the story such major coverage, Silver points out, even though it strongly suggested that Clinton would still win. Of course, the letter was a big story and deserved front-page treatment. But the reason for this level of coverage, despite the letter’s tentative and speculative contents? Silver theorized that the Times covered the letter as it did because it saw Clinton as the almost certain next president—and Trump as a historical footnote. By treating the letter as a huge deal, it could get a head start on covering the next administration and its imbroglios. It could also “prove” to its critics that it could provide tough coverage of Democrats, thereby countering accusations of liberal bias (a long-standing hang-up at the paper). So what if it wasn’t clear from the letter whether Clinton had done anything wrong? The Times could use the same weasel-worded language it often does in such situations, speaking of Comey’s letter as having “cast a cloud” over Clinton.
In a sense, the paper of record may have made a version of the same mistake that Comey reportedly did. The newspaper’s editors and reporters needed to consider how their own actions might influence the outcome and invalidate their assessment. That influence was substantial in Comey’s case and marginal for the Times, as one of many media outlets covering the story. But the media’s choices as a whole mattered, and the tone of campaign coverage shifted substantially just as voters were going to the polls.
* * *
In fact, Clinton’s voter support started to sag immediately. FiveThirtyEight and several other polling organizations that compile all the respectable national and state polls found that her support immediately dropped 3–4 percent nationally, and more in most battleground states. The intensely negative, often inaccurate and distorted, virtually round-the-clock media coverage of Clinton in the closing eleven days of the campaign and continuing throughout Election Day without a doubt cost her heavily among voters, especially, the data shows, among “late deciders” and working-class, rural voters in key states.
The dominant and overwhelming negative media treatment of Clinton immediately after the Comey letter was extensively documented by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School. The center tallied, read, and evaluated the substance of all the stories written after the letter and found abrupt and stark negative shifts against Clinton during the last eleven days of the campaign when so many undecided and swing voters were making up their minds.
For example, the quantity of media stories referring to Clinton’s emails, “investigation,” and the word “scandal” went from fourteen on October 23 to thirty-seven by Election Day. The print, broadcast, and cable news organizations selected by Shorenstein to study tallied one hundred stories, forty-six of which were on the front page, about or mentioning emails and referring to Comey’s letter. The New York Times, for example, blanketed its front pages with stories about the letter, beginning on October 28, when seven stories on the letter disclosing no new facts were on the front page, with a color photograph of Clinton and her senior aide Huma Abedin.
The qualitative analysis—evaluating the “tone” of a story, whether clearly negative or clearly positive—by the Shorenstein researchers also found a major negative shift against Clinton. Measuring the ratio of negative “tone” versus positive “tone,” Shorenstein researchers found that Clinton went from October 23, less than a week before the Comey letter, with a rating of -2 or -3, to -50 by October 30—a drop of 48 points in a week’s time. In contrast, the opposite happened to Trump. The tone of his media coverage shifted, relatively speaking, more positively from October 23 to 30: from -81 to -38 by Election Day—a positive increase of 43 (or, more accurately, a reduction in negative).
That represents an astonishing, cataclysmic net shift against Hillary Clinton. There was no event that occurred to cause this level of a negative shift other than Comey’s letter.
* * *
The data news aggregation website Memeorandum performed a similar quantitative and qualitative analysis of news coverage post–Comey letter and showed the same results as Shorenstein. This one was broken down day-by-day, morning and evening, from October 20 to November 7, the day before Election Day. The Memeorandum website developed a mathematical algorithm that tracked which stories were gaining the most traction in the mainstream media. Comey’s letter was the lead story on six out of seven mornings from October 29 to November 4, pausing for only a half day when Mother Jones and Slate published stories alleging ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Here are the daily results:
MORNING (9 A.M.)
EVENING (5 P.M.)
Oct. 20
Debate recap
Will Trump accept election results?
21
Trump campaign palace intrigue
Multiple systems attack
22
Trump hotels to drop Trump name
Trump sexual assault accusations
23
Trump sexual assault accusations
Polls
24
Terry McAuliffe investigation
WikiLeaks/Podesta
25
Breitbart coordination with Democrats
Trump campaign palace intrigue
26
Newt Gingrich vs. Megyn Kelly
Trump’s Hollywood star vandalized
27
Trump campaign palace intrigue
Trump campaign palace intrigue
28
Oregon/Ammon Bundy standoff
Comey letter/Clinton emails
29
Comey letter/Clinton emails
Comey letter/Clinton emails
30
Comey letter/Clinton emails
Comey letter/Clinton emails
31
Comey letter/Clinton emails
Comey letter/Clinton emails
Nov. 1
Trump/Russia ties
Polls
2
Comey letter/Clinton emails
Comey letter/Clinton emails
3
Comey letter/Clinton emails
Comey letter/
Clinton emails
4
Comey letter/Clinton emails
Terror threat
5
National Enquirer and Trump
Early voting data
6
Trump Secret Service scare
Trump campaign palace intrigue
7
Polls [showing Clinton declining]
Polls
Source: FiveThirtyEight
2. Voter “sentiments” or feelings toward Clinton shifted negatively by a substantial margin in the days following the Comey letter.
Another study—this one perhaps the most meaningful in terms of demonstrating voter movement against Clinton and toward Trump—was performed by a consumer survey/marketing company called Engagement Labs. This organization conducts systematic surveys of consumers online to measure “sentiment,” “feelings,” etc., for a candidate, not black-and-white polling on who they say they are going to vote for. Engagement Labs describes their survey as conducting “conversations” with voters to determine their “sentiments”—in this case, Clinton versus Trump, beginning in mid-September and continuing through the weekend before Election Day.
Brad Fay, chief commercial officer of Engagement Labs, reported the results in a March 6, 2017, article posted on the Huffington Post.2 They were, to use Fay’s word, stunning. Most political scientists and observers believe that the key salient factor determining a voter’s choice for president is this non-issue-based, personal “sentiment” or “feeling” toward the candidate as the voter approaches Election Day, especially among “soft” or undecided voters at the end of a campaign.
The Unmaking of the President 2016 Page 12