FBI Director James Comey. (Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency)You can debate whether FBI Director James B. Comey's late-October announcement that potentially relevant information had been uncovered regarding Hillary Clinton's private email server cost her the presidential election. Trump's campaign used the “extremely careless” language in ads and Democrats grumbled that Comey had overstepped the bounds of his office. My working assumption is that he was deeply cowed by Republican threats about transparency when it came to the FBI investigation of the Clinton server. But I am hard-pressed to understand why Comey did what he did in the dying days of the campaign.

Source: Washington Post January 12, 2017 20:10 UTC