In a note to his staff, FBI Director James Comey said he felt obligated to alert Congress to a development in the Hillary Clinton email server investigation, despite concerns about being misunderstood.
{mosads}In an internal memo obtained by the Washington Post, written before he sent a letter to lawmakers about newly recovered emails that may have an impact on the investigation, Comey said he felt “an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent moths that our investigation was completed.”
“Of course, we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record,” he wrote.
In his letter, Comey was sparse on details of the new messages, saying only that they were uncovered through a separate investigation and that the bureau would take proper “investigative steps” to determine their pertinence to the Clinton case and whether any contained confidential information.
“Given that we don’t know the significance of his newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression,” he wrote in the memo.
”In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter and in the middle of an election season, there is significant risk of being misunderstood.”