“We Don’t Operate on Innuendo’
President Barack Obama has broken his silence, deciding to weigh in on Friday’s release of a letter to Congress by FBI Director James Comey that many prominent law enforcement officials have denounced.
“We don’t operate on innuendo,” said the President, clearly chastising the FBI Director although not mentioning him by name. He made his remarks in an exclusive interview with NowThis News, which was posted to Twitter Wednesday.Â
“We don’t operate on incomplete information, President Obama continued. “We don’t operate on leaks. We operate based on concrete decisions that are made.”
“When this was investigated thoroughly the last time, the conclusion of the FBI, the conclusion of the Justice Department, the conclusion of repeated congressional investigations was that she had made some mistakes but that there wasn’t anything there that was prosecutable,” Obama said.
The New York Times, publishing the interview, characterized the president’s remarks as “sharply” critical of “the decision by his F.B.I. director to alert Congress on Friday about the discovery of new emails related to the Hillary Clinton server case, implying that it violated investigative guidelines and trafficked in innuendo.”
The White House, the Times reports, “later downplayed Mr. Obama’s remarks about the F.B.I. and insisted he had not meant to criticize Mr. Comey.”
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Image: Screenshot via NowThis/Twitter