Comey’s Campaign Gift

FBI Director James Comey’s systematic dismantling of Hillary Clinton’s claims that she followed the law with her secret email server is a gift that will undoubtedly keep on giving to Donald Trump and his campaign all the way until Election Day.

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Indeed, the Trump campaign’s first ad using footage from Comey’s statement has already been released — a devastating juxtaposition of Comey’s revelations about Clinton and her own past lies regarding the investigation.

Comey may have spared Clinton from prison, but he also subverted her central campaign strategy.

“I did not send or receive any information that was marked classified at the time,” Clinton says in a clip featured in the ad, which then cuts to Comey confirming that “from the group of 30,000 emails returned to the State Department in 2014, 110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received.”

In addition to confirming that Clinton did indeed send and receive classified information on her private server, Comey also confirmed that Clinton had multiple personal mobile devices connected to the server and that her private server wasn’t legally permitted, both things Clinton has repeatedly denied.

But in addition to giving the Trump campaign conclusive evidence of Clinton’s seemingly pathological inability to tell the truth, Comey’s press conference on Tuesday may very well have done one better for Trump — and undermined Clinton’s campaign strategy.

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Until now Clinton’s entire campaign strategy was based on portraying Trump as unfit for the presidency. Trump is “temperamentally unfit to be our next president” claims one Clinton campaign email, while another asserted his is “unprepared” for office.

Hillary’s particular favorite adjective to describe Trump seems to be “reckless” — a word she has applied to everything from his economic policy to his response to the Orlando shooting.

It will be nearly impossible for the Clinton camp to continue this line of attack on Trump after Comey stated plainly that Clinton and her colleagues “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

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Moreover, his assertion that “it is possible that hostile actors gained access” to Clinton’s email account only reinforces Clinton’s own recklessness, and it will hard to take Clinton’s charges of irresponsibility against Trump seriously after Comey confirmed that “there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes” which govern the handling of classified information.

Comey may have spared Clinton from prison, but he also subverted her campaign. All she has left to tackle Trump is accusations of racism, accusations which, given the sociopolitical realities of mass immigration and the dangers of international Islamic terror, will be a far less effective route of attack.