Reid: Comey ‘Personally Put A Black Mark On The FBI’

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid blasted FBI Director James Comey as the bureau’s most damaging leader since the divisive J. Edgar Hoover, after Comey announced that the FBI would investigate a newly uncovered cache of Hillary Clinton’s emails 10 days before the election and then cleared her again with two days remaining.

“Comey has done more damage to the FBI than anyone since J. Edgar Hoover,” Reid said during an interview with Politico. “I think he has personally put a black mark on the FBI that will never go away. I made a mistake [confirming him]. Because I didn’t know he was such a Republican.”

Since he is preparing to retire, the Nevada senator said that he does not plan to ask Comey to step down, but he will instead sit back and allow some of his “other colleagues to say that.”

Comey’s actions have ruffled many of his colleagues’ feathers as well, including Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California.

“The October surprise that came only 11 days before Election Day has unfairly hurt the campaign of one candidate and changed the tenor of this election,” Feinstein said in a statement, in which she said that Comey’s announcement made the one several days ago “even more troubling” by creating “a false impression about the nature of the agency’s inquiry.”

Reid said that he is debating whether he should blast Comey in a speech after the nation elects a new president on November 8.

“I don’t know if I’m going to say anything about him or not,” Reid said. “Probably I won’t. I think the FBI is just so damaged.”

The Nevada Democrat’s comments came after Comey updated Congress on the agency’s stance toward the new batch of emails on November 6, little more than a week after he stated that the emails might be relevant to a Clinton’s investigation.

“Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July,” Comey wrote in an updated letter to Congress, according to CNN.

Sources: Politico, CNN / Photo Credit: Center For American Progress/Flickr