The AG could have ordered Comey not to send his bombshell letter on Clinton emails...why she didn't

[DonViejo]

The attorney general could have ordered FBI Director James Comey not to send his bombshell letter on Clinton emails. Here’s why she didn’t.

By Sari Horwitz December 22 at 4:53 PM

Twelve days before the presidential election, FBI Director James B. Comey dispatched a senior aide to deliver a startling message to the Justice Department. Comey wanted to send a letter to Congress alerting them that his agents had discovered more emails potentially relevant to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

The official in Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates’s office who received the FBI call immediately understood the explosive potential of Comey’s message, coming so close to the presidential election. Federal attorneys scrambled into offices on the fourth and fifth floors of Justice Department headquarters, where they huddled to figure out how to stop what they viewed as a ticking time bomb.

“It was DEFCON 1,” said an official familiar with the deliberations. “We were in­cred­ibly concerned this could have an impact on the election.”

Aides at Justice and the FBI — located in offices directly across the street from each other on Pennsylvania Avenue — began exchanging increasingly tense and heated phone calls, nearly a half-dozen throughout the afternoon and evening of Oct. 27 and into the next morning.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-attorney-general-could-have-ordered-fbi-director-james-comey-not-to-send-his-bombshell-letter-on-clinton-emails-heres-why-she-didnt/2016/12/21/7824d00a-c5fd-11e6-85b5-76616a33048d_story.html?utm_term=.5bc43c41794b&wpisrc=nl_evening&wpmm=1