Was Comey’s Letter to Congress Driven By Fear He’d Be Impeached?

In his accounts of his decision to notify Congress that the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails had been reopened in the waning days of the 2016 election, former FBI Director James Comey has always said he was trying to protect the FBI, despite the personal sacrifice that might entail.

“I knew this would be disastrous for me personally, but I thought this is the best way to protect these institutions that we care so much about,” before Congress in May 2017. In his memoir, , Comey wrote that he and the leadership at the FBI “kept coming down to the same place: the credibility of the institutions of justice was at stake.” In an op-ed written Thursday for , that “My team believed the damage of concealing the reopening of our investigation would have been