A senior aide to Hillary Clinton privately dismissed FBI Director James Comey as “a bad choice” in October 2015, newly released emails from WikiLeaks quoted by The Associated Press on Friday reveal.
Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri forwarded to colleagues a news article in which the FBI director suggested that crime could be rising because police officers were becoming less aggressive as a result of the “Ferguson effect,” anti-police sentiment following unrest earlier that year in Ferguson, Missouri. Comey was widely criticized over the remarks.
Palmieri wrote, “Get a big fat ‘I told you so’ on Comey being a bad choice,” according to AP. She sent the email to Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and to the private email address of someone who appeared to be White House spokesman Eric Schultz.
Neither responded, noted AP, and Palmieri did not appear to write further about the subject. Palmieri was the White House director of communications when Comey was appointed FBI director by President Barack Obama in September 2013.
The disclosure came days after Comey notified Congress that during an investigation of Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s now-separated husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, FBI agents found indications that a laptop used by Weiner contained some emails related to the FBI’s earlier probe of Clinton’s private computer server and emails.
The disclosure roiled the presidential campaign, and last week Palmieri openly criticized Comey about the notification.
“By taking this highly unusual, unprecedented action this close to the election, he put himself in the middle of the campaign,” Palmieri said of Comey at the time, according to AP.
Comey announced in July that he was recommending against criminal charges in the investigation of Clinton’s use of her private server, but the FBI director also delivered blistering criticism that Clinton and her colleagues at the State Department were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
The Palmieri email was among more than 2,000 new messages published Thursday by WikiLeaks and that were hacked from Podesta’s private account, noted AP.
WikiLeaks has published several damaging emails from Podesta’s account in recent weeks. Just last week, the site revealed a message in which Clinton aide Neera Tanden referred to Israel as “depressing” following the re-election of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in 2015.
In one message, sent on December 8, 2015, a close Clinton associate briefed campaign officials and said that Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, told him that surprisingly Netanyahu had better relations with Clinton.
Another email showed that Clinton believes that a peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that is only for show is better than no peace process at all.
Yet another leaked email appeared to suggest that Clinton places high importance on repairing U.S.-Israel tensions in her first month as president and is eager to patch things up with Netanyahu.
The U.S. government has said the Russian government was responsible for leaking the emails to WikiLeaks, but WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange denies this.
(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)