WASHINGTON — President Obama sharply criticized the decision by his FBI director to alert Congress on Friday about the discovery of new e-mails related to the Hillary Clinton server case, implying that it violated investigative norms and trafficked in innuendo.
"We don't operate on incomplete information," Obama said in an interview with NowThis News, broadcast Wednesday. "We don't operate on leaks. We operate based on concrete decisions that are made."
"When this was investigated thoroughly the last time, the conclusion of the FBI, the conclusion of the Justice Department, the conclusion of repeated congressional investigations was that she had made some mistakes but that there wasn't anything there that was prosecutable," Obama said.
Declaring that he had "made a very deliberate effort to make sure that I don't look like I'm meddling in what are supposed to be independent processes for making these assessments," Obama nonetheless expressed confidence in Clinton and her integrity.
The president's comments were somewhat surprising since he weighed in on the investigation last year before the FBI had determined that neither Clinton nor her aides would face charges for mishandling classified information that was found on the secretary of state's private e-mail server. The president's comments angered FBI agents.
"I don't think it posed a national security problem," Obama said on "60 Minutes" on CBS in October 2015. He said it had been a mistake for Clinton to use a private e-mail account when she was secretary of state, but his conclusion was unmistakable: "This is not a situation in which America's national security was endangered."
Obama took a sharper tone than his press secretary, Josh Earnest, who said on Tuesday that the White House did not have an official position on whether the decision by FBI Director James Comey to alert Congress about the FBI's pending analysis of a new cache of e-mails related to the use by Clinton of a private e-mail server when she was secretary of state.
