On reopening Clinton email probe, FBI boss says options were ‘really bad’ and ‘catastrophic’

Washington • FBI Director James Comey told Congress Wednesday that revealing the reopening of the Hillary Clinton email probe just before Election Day came down to a painful, complicated choice between "really bad" and "catastrophic" options. He said he had felt "slightly nauseous" to think he might have tipped the election outcome but in hindsight would change nothing.

"I would make the same decision," Comey declared during a lengthy hearing in which Democratic senators grilled him on the seeming inconsistency between the Clinton disclosure 11 days before the election and his silence about the FBI investigation into possible contacts between Russia and Trump's campaign.

Comey insisted the FBI's actions in both investigations were consistent. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the FBI cannot take into account how it might benefit or harm politicians.

"I can't consider for a second whose political futures will be affected and in what way," Comey told the senators.

On Tuesday, Clinton partly attributed her loss to Comey's disclosure to Congress less than two weeks before Election Day that the email investigation would be revisited. Trump disagreed, tweeting that Comey actually "was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds!"

Comey said he faced two difficult decisions when agents told him in October that they had found emails potentially connected to the Clinton case on a laptop belonging to former Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., who separated last year from top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Weiner's laptop was seized as part of a sexting investigation involving a teenage girl.

Comey said he knew it would be unorthodox to alert Congress to that discovery 11 days before the presidential election. But while that option was "really bad," he said he figured it'd be worse to hide the discovery from lawmakers, especially when he had testified under oath that the investigation had been concluded and had promised to advise lawmakers if it needed to be reopened. Plus, he said, his agents weren't optimistic that they could finish reviewing the thousands of emails on the laptop before the election and could not rule out that they would find evidence of "bad intent."

"Concealing in my view would be catastrophic, not just to the FBI, but well beyond," Comey said, in explaining his options. "And honestly, as between really bad and catastrophic, I said to my team we got to walk into the world of really bad. I've got to tell Congress that we're restarting this, not in some frivolous way, in a hugely significant way."