Comey: Twitter is ‘like every dive bar in America’

FBI Director James Comey on Monday confirmed he uses Twitter, adding that the social media platform sometimes resembles “every dive bar in America.”

“I am not a tweeter,” he said at the Anti-Defamation League conference in Washington, D.C., according to NBC News. “I am there to listen, to read especially what’s being said about the FBI and its mission.”

“And sometimes it’s a wonderful place and sometimes it’s a depressing place. Sometimes it feels like I’m all of a sudden immediately in every dive bar in America, where I can hear everybody screaming at the television set.”

Comey added that the FBI would protect the “vital right” of free speech on Twitter and other mediums.

“But it is free speech,” he said. “You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to agree with it, but we will protect it.”

“[It’s] because it is the bedrock of this great country that we can believe and say what we want no matter how distasteful or disruptive.”

{mosads}Comey last week stood by his controversial decision last October to announce that the bureau had renewed its probe into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

“I sat there that morning and could not see a door labeled ‘no action here,’” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“I saw two doors,” Comey added. “One was labeled ‘speak,’ and one was labeled ‘conceal.’ It makes me mildly nauseous to think we had an impact on the election.”

Comey sent a letter to Congress last Oct. 28 informing lawmakers that investigators had uncovered new emails that appeared pertinent to the FBI’s probe of Clinton’s server and whether the former secretary of State had mishandled classified information. A week later, the FBI said it had found nothing to change its recommendation that Clinton not be charged.

Clinton has repeatedly suggested Comey is partially responsible for her loss in the presidential election.