For the but-tell-us-how-you-really-feel file, this headline on a Friday post by Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum: “Fuck You, James Comey.” The post, of course, centered on the presumed effect on presidential voting of Comey’s October 28 letter which jump-started the Hillary Clinton e-mail story.
“When an election is close…there are dozens of people, events, and movements that can make a difference of 1 percent or so,” wrote Drum. “I blame Emailgate. In a purely abstract way, I almost admire the ability of Republicans to elevate a self-evident molehill into a groundless smear on Hillary Clinton for the tenth or twentieth time and still get anyone to pay attention to it. It took dogged persistence and a wide cast of characters to make it happen: Trey Gowdy, Judicial Watch, Julian Assange, a rotating bench of judges, Vladimir Putin, a gullible press corps, Jason Chaffetz, the FBI, and many more.
“But if we're going to choose one particular person who managed to hand the White House to a buffoonish game show host,” Drum went on, “it's FBI director James Comey, the guy who inexplicably released a letter a week before the election that yet again implied some kind of vague, amorphous wrongdoing on the part of Hillary Clinton…Comey provided the match that Trump used to light the country on fire.”
After citing a Bloomberg News report that the Comey letter “accelerated the shift of a largely hidden rural mass of voters toward Trump,” Drum asked and answered, “Did that letter make a difference of 1 percent [in the popular vote]? No one will ever be able to prove or disprove it, but I'll bet it did.”
