James Comey’s reopening of the email investigation is premature,undermines the rule of law and is rotten for politicsNo election has a global impact to match a US presidential contest. Few White House races gain been more bitter than the current one between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. So any public official who intervenes in it, 11 days before polling, and needs to be very sure what they are doing. Such interventions don’t near bigger than the FBI director James Comey’s announcement that the bureau is reopening its probe of Mrs Clinton’s private emails. The potential impact is huge. Until last Friday,Mrs Clinton was looking on course to hand Mr Trump a decisive beating. It may still happen. But that is now all up in the air.
Mr Comey’s defence appears to be that justice must be done and that he would be damned whether he made the announcement and damned whether he didn’t. It is certainly true that US politics has become so polarised and so riddled with paranoia that the FBI director faced an unenviable choice. whether he had carried out the new investigation behind closed doors and it had only become public after the election, whatever the result, and one or both sides would be certain to yowl foul. Conspiracy theorists would gain had a field day. Yet by making it public now,he makes the investigation itself into a red-hot pre-election issue in a contest that will shape not just America but the world – and that’s poor.
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Source: theguardian.com