James Comey says he “almost got emotional” with President Barack Obama shortly after the 2016 election, after he had been widely criticized for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, particularly the letter he sent to members of Congress just 11 days before the election that the FBI had reopened its investigation after finding additional emails. Many Democrats, including Clinton, believe that the announcement so close to the election may well have cost her the presidency.
“He held me back after one of the very last meetings I had with him, after the election, and said he didn’t wanna talk to me about any particular case, ’cause he was very scrupulous about that. And he said, ‘But I wanna just tell you something generally. I appointed you to be FBI director because of your integrity and your ability,'” Comey said in an exclusive interview with ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos.
“Then he looked me in the eye and he said, ‘Nothing has happened, nothing, in the last year that has changed my view of that,'” Comey added.
The interaction was one of many Comey revealed for the first time in the interview ahead of the April 17 release of his book, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.”
“Look, he wasn’t telling me, ‘I agree with what you did,'” Comey said of Obama. “He wasn’t telling me, ‘You made the right decision.’ He was telling me, ‘I know where it came from. I know you’re not a partisan hack. I know you’re trying to do the right thing.’ And it meant a lot to me.” Comey said in a 2016 Capitol Hill hearing that he had been a registered Republican for most of his adult life but wasn’t anymore. He said in the interview with Stephanopoulos that “I had not been a political supporter of President Obama’s.”
But over the course of Obama’s time in office, Comey’s feelings changed.
“I came to deeply respect him, and his higher loyalty to the values I care a lot about,” Comey said. Comey told Stephanopoulos that in the last 10 days of the 2016 campaign, after he announced that the FBI would be looking back at the Clinton email investigation in connection to emails found on former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s computer, he felt like the lead character in the movie “The Sixth Sense,” in which Bruce Willis played a man who didn’t know he was already dead.
“I almost got emotional in that moment [with Obama] ’cause, again, I’d been walking around like Bruce Willis in ‘The Sixth Sense.’ And [to] have the president of the United States say, ‘I…
