FBI Director Comey back in spotlight

FBI Director James Comey will be back in the spotlight on Wednesday when he testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

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It’s the first of two hotly anticipated hearings for Comey, who on Thursday will appear behind closed doors before the House Intelligence Committee.

The hearing comes one day after Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president last year, again blamed Comey in part for her defeat.Clinton told a Women for Women International event that she “was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey’s letter on Oct. 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me, but got scared off.”

The letter, sent 11 days before Election Day, informed lawmakers that investigators had uncovered emails that appeared to be pertinent to the bureau’s probe, considered completed at the time, of Clinton’s private email server.

The Justice Department’s inspector general is looking into allegations that Comey broke bureau policy with his public disclosures regarding that investigation.

Democrats are still fuming over Comey’s actions, particularly since the FBI director only made public last month an investigation into possible links between President Trump’s campaign and Russian meddling in the election.

The Senate appearance will be Comey’s first public testimony since he announced that probe.

But Senate Republicans also have a bone to pick with the FBI director, and Comey can expect a public grilling from Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

In the past few weeks, Grassley has sent letters to the director pressing him on “inconsistencies” in his testimony on a dossier containing incendiary, but unverified, allegations about Trump, as well as the role of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe in the investigation.

Republicans repeatedly argued that McCabe should have recused himself from the Clinton investigation following reports a Clinton ally donated to his wife’s political campaign. The donations are also under investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Grassley last week said that McCabe’s participation in the bureau’s Russia probe creates “the exact same appearance of a partisan conflict of interest against Mr. Trump.”

On Friday, he pressed the director on what he described as “material” discrepancies between information Comey gave during a March briefing about the dossier on Trump and Justice Department documents made available after the closed-door meeting.

The FBI in September reportedly offered to pay a former MI6 agent $50,000 if he could substantiate explosive allegations in an unconfirmed dossier he had produced regarding Trump’s “compromising relationship with the Kremlin.” The document warned of the possibility of blackmail.

The British agent, Christopher Steele, had produced the dossier initially as opposition research into Trump. Ultimately, he was not paid.

Comey briefed Grassley and ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on the reports after Grassley threatened to hold up the nomination for the deputy attorney general, but Grassley claimed Friday that the briefing left many questions unanswered.

In the House, Comey’s behind-closed-doors appearance will be the first major test for a fragile truce between Intelligence Committee Republicans and Democrats since Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) recused himself from the probe.

Comey will appear with National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers before the committee as part of its beleaguered investigation into Russian meddling in the election.

In the past several weeks, the investigation had split into two competing tracks, with Republicans doggedly pursuing leaks of classified information — the result of improper “unmasking” of U.S. names in surveillance intercepts, they say — and Democrats seeking to ferret out connections between the Trump administration and Russia.

In dozens of instances during his March public appearance before the committee, Comey declined to answer lawmakers’ questions in an open setting.

An even bigger media storm will occur next week, when former acting Attorney General Sally Yates testifies before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.

Yates, an Obama appointee fired by Trump in February, is expected to provide testimony contradicting the White House’s story of the firing of former national security adviser Michael Flynn.