In a completely unprecedented move, President of the United States Donald Trump has fired the head of the FBI, James Comey.
It comes after months of intense speculation that reads like the plot of a Hollywood movie over Hillary Clinton’s emails and Russian involvement with Trump (and Clinton, for that matter!).
Comey said that one of Clinton’s top aides, Huma Abedin, had sent “hundreds and thousands” of emails to her husband’s laptop, including some with classified information.
Clinton maintains the FBI’s involvement in re-opening the case against her was the reason she lost the election as it made the American public lose trust in her.
“If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president,” she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour at a Women for Women International event in New York.
“But I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me and got scared off.”
This assessment of the 2016 election was presented by FiveThirtyEight statistician Nate Silver in December last year, who felt Ms Clinton would have “almost certainly” become president if not for Comey’s letter.
“The evidence for that intervening event is, I think, compelling, persuasive, and so we overcame a lot in the campaign,” Clinton revealed.
“The reason I believe we lost were the intervening events in the last 10 days.”
Now Trump has sensationally sacked Comey, releasing the following statement:
“The FBI is one of our nation’s most cherished and respected institutions, and today will mark a new beginning for our crown jewel of law enforcement.
“It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission,” Trump wrote.
It comes just a week after Comey told the Senate committee he felt “mildly nauseous” to think his announcement of the reopening of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails affected the 2016 presidential election.
On Tuesday, the FBI said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that only “a small number” of the alleged “thousands” of emails found on the laptop had been forwarded while most had simply been backed up from electronic devices.
