Breaking: Comey updates Congress: No change to July conclusions on Clinton

Is everyone ready to trade jerseys and switch which side is calling for James Comey to resign again? CNN broke the news a little while ago letting us know that the FBI director has sent a followup letter to Congress informing them that they have finished going over all of the emails on Carlos Danger’s laptop which were to or from Clinton and they are not changing “the conclusions” they reached in July. (CNN)

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FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers Sunday the agency hasn’t changed its opinion that Hillary Clinton should not face criminal charges after a review of new emails.

Comey had dropped a bombshell 11 days from the election when he informed Congress that the FBI had discovered emails in its separate investigation of Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, that could be connected to its investigation of whether Clinton mishandled classified information by using a private email server.

The news could help Clinton put to rest a controversy that has dogged her in the 2016 race’s closing days, helping Donald Trump narrow a polling gap nationally and in key battleground states.

Here’s the cover page of the actual letter. (Click for full size version)

letter

If the quality of the reproduction isn’t good, here’s the full text.

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

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This should be like mana from heaven for the Clinton campaign, assuming that enough people actually hear about it and are really concerned. This does leave a couple of questions for us to ponder, however. First of all, the letter speaks directly about emails “to or from Hillary Clinton.” It goes on to say their conclusions hadn’t changed “with respect to Secretary Clinton.” So does that cover all the emails on the device. What about Huma Abedin, who seems to still have questions to answer about why all of that email was on her husband’s laptop after she swore under oath that she’d turned everything over? We may get part of that answer from this hint.

Okay, so the emails of Hillary’s were duplicates or personal. That helps her, but still doesn’t say much about the Huma situation.

The other point here is to ask if Clinton gets any serious mileage out it between now and Tuesday night. We kept waiting for some sort of massive collapse in the polls after Comey’s first letter and Trump definitely picked up some ground, but it wasn’t a total cratering of her numbers. I think it remains unclear just how much voters were taking that into account. Most polls before and after indicate that a majority of people think she did something illegal no matter what the FBI decided.

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At any rate, that’s the breaking news for today.

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