Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has had a difficult time endorsing GOP candidate Donald Trump. But Ryan has seemingly learned some lessons from Trump’s style of casting aspersions. In a Trump-style accusation, Ryan implied that the FBI was trying to protect Hillary Clinton by releasing information about its probe into her emails late on Friday, the day before the long Labor Day weekend. Ryan told WRJN radio: “I can’t believe that they would do what is such a patently political move. It makes them look like political operators versus law enforcement officers.”
Calling into question the judgment, honesty, and motivations of the FBI — the nation’s top domestic law enforcement agency — is no small matter for a “law and order” guy like Ryan. FBI Director James Comey, who had seen all the evidence long before Friday, had earlier explained what the FBI did and saw in this memo — before recommending no charges be brought against Clinton. Comey is formerly a registered Republican, now an Independent. Testifying before the Senate about the Department of Justice in 2007, Comey addressed the importance of nonpartisanship for large government departments:
“The Department of Justice, in my view, is run by political appointees of the President. The U.S. attorneys are political appointees of the President. But once they take those jobs and run this institution, it’s very important in my view for that institution to be another in American life, that—because my people had to stand up before juries of all stripes, talk to sheriffs of all stripes, judges of all stripes. They had to be seen as the good guys, and not as either this administration or that administration.”
