Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) has said it—and now FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver is reiterating the claim that FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress informing them that the bureau would be analyzing the emails found on the laptop of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin in October played a heavy role in the election tilting in favor of President-elect Donald Trump (via Washington Examiner):
Statistics expert Nate Silver claims defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would "almost certainly" have made it to the Oval Office if the election had been held before FBI Director James Comey announced the reopening of the agency's investigation into her private email practices."Comey had a large, measurable impact on the race," wrote Silver, who ran FiveThirtyEight's election forecast, in a series of tweets Sunday morning.
According to Silver, voters who decided to cast their ballots in the final week before Election Day "broke strongly against Clinton," particularly in three of the major battleground states she ultimately lost to President-elect Trump.
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"I'll put it like this: Clinton would almost certainly be President-elect if the election had been held on Oct. 27," he tweeted, referring to the day before Comey sent a letter to congressional committee heads about the agency's reopened investigation.
At the time, Comey’s letter drove Democrats ballistic—and I guess for a good reason since they knew, unlike Lady Macbeth, how the email issue fared with voters, regardless of whether they felt the issue was overblown or not. So, for the disgruntled Clinton supporters out there, they’re certainly going to blame Comey. Still, these emails wouldn’t even have been an issue if Hillary Clinton followed protocol. If she didn’t have an unauthorized and unsecure server set up at the State Department, this wouldn’t have been an issue, the FBI wouldn’t have become a centerpiece in the 2016 cycle, and the FBI wouldn’t have devoted hours and countless resources into investigating whether she mishandled classified information. The bureau’s criminal probe did much damage to Clinton on character issues. That’s her fault. Clinton said the State Department approved the email arrangement, which was debunked by the agency’s own inspector general. No classified information was sent or received through the server. That was a lie. Three emails were marked classified at the time they were sent and received, but were improperly marked. Thousands of emails were later retroactively up-classified. The email arrangement possibly put our national security at risk. That wasn’t the fault of the Russians or the media—it was Hillary Rodham Clinton. So, it really doesn’t matter if Comey possibly tilted the election or not—if Hillary decided not to go off the reservation, she might be the one putting her hand on the Bible on January 20 and not Trump.