Book: Hillary Clinton Was Originally Thrilled When Trump Fired Comey

Hillary Clinton, like most Democrats, was a fierce critic of FBI Director James Comey. She and her supporters bashed him from pillar to post, accusing him of showboating in the summer of 2016 with his vicious critique of how Clinton handled classified information. And then they were apoplectic in October when he re-opened the email investigation upon discovering additional emails on the computer of Anthony Weiner. They accused him of costing Clinton the election with his last-minute review of those emails, which did not conclude until only days before voters went to the polls.

And Clinton, according to a new book, was over-the-moon with happiness when President Trump handed Comey his walking papers.

In “We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to AOC, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement,” left-wing activist Ryan Grim says that Clinton was initially “ecstatic” when Comey was fired. So much so that her friends and aides had to talk her out of applauding the move publicly.

“She had spent the winter and spring poring over survey and turnout data, calling friends and former aides relentlessly, analyzing and re-analyzing,” Grim writes. “It was, her friends believed, both part of her grieving process, but also holding her back from moving on. When she learned that Comey had been fired by Trump, she was ecstatic. Comey had finally gotten what he had coming.”

In an interview with former Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon, Grim found confirmation of this account.

“In the immediate aftermath,” Fallon said, “people weren’t sure how to respond. There were people who started buying into Trump’s rationale.”

Even months after the Comey firing, Clinton found herself unable to fully join the liberal chorus condemning Trump for the move. While taking ample opportunity to criticize her 2016 opponent on every other imaginable topic under the sun, she was much more circumspect when the subject turned to the disgraced former FBI director.

Asked by NBC’s Today Show in September 2017 about Comey’s firing, Clinton would only say: “He was fired for the wrong reason.”

Still, she said: “The deputy attorney general, backed by the attorney general of this administration, laid out in excruciating detail all of the protocols and rules that [Comey] broke.”

Trump later admitted that the Clinton investigation had little bearing on his decision to fire Comey, but it’s clear that Hillary was willing to take the win either way. We highly doubt that, even to this day, she sheds a tear for the plight of Mr. Comey.