“There’s a longstanding policy of not doing anything that could influence an election,” said George J. Terwilliger III, a deputy attorney general under President George Bush. “Those guidelines exist for a reason. Sometimes, that makes for hard decisions. But bypassing them has consequences.”
He added, “There’s a difference between being independent and flying solo.”
.. After hearing the Justice Department’s concerns, Mr. Comey concluded that the ramifications of not telling Congress promptly about the new emails far outweighed concerns about the department guidelines, one senior law enforcement official said.
Under Justice Department policy, restated each election cycle, politics should play no role in any investigative decisions. In Democratic and Republican administrations, Justice Department officials have interpreted that policy broadly, to cover any steps that might give even an impression of partisanship.
Terry McAuliffee Donation to Deputy FBI Directory’s Wife’s Campaign
Campaign finance records show Mr. McAuliffe’s political-action committee donated $467,500 to the 2015 state Senate campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, who is married to Andrew McCabe, now the deputy director of the FBI.
.. Andrew McCabe might be the straightest arrow in the entire quiver of the Bureau, and Mrs. McCabe might have never even discussed the Clinton prosecution with him. But if your spouse is going to be involved in politics, you should not oversee criminal investigations of political figures. It will always present the appearance of a conflict of interest.
Is everybody at the FBI married to a partisan political figure?
F.B.I. Error Locked San Bernardino Attacker’s iPhone
F.B.I. personnel apparently believed that by resetting the iCloud password, they could get access to information stored on the iPhone. Instead, the change had the opposite effect — locking them out and eliminating other means of getting in.
.. F.B.I. officials say that encrypted data in Mr. Farook’s phone and its GPS system may hold vital clues about where he and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, traveled in the 18 minutes after the shootings, and about whom they might have contacted beforehand.
.. Mr. Sewell, the Apple lawyer, explained to the committee that before F.B.I. officials ordered the password reset, Apple first wanted them to try to connect the phone to a “known” Wi-Fi connection that Mr. Farook had used. Doing so might have recovered information saved to the phone since October, when it was last connected to iCloud.
“The very information that the F.B.I. is seeking would have been available, and we could have pulled it down from the cloud,” he said.
.. “If the F.B.I. hadn’t instructed San Bernardino County to change the password to the iCloud account, all this would have been unnecessary, and you would have had that information,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York.
Mr. Gowdy leveled a similar criticism during the more than two and a half hours of testimony from Mr. Comey.
“With all due respect to the F.B.I., they didn’t do what Apple had suggested they do in order to retrieve the data, correct?” Mr. Gowdy asked the director. “I mean, when they went to change the password, that kind of screwed things up, did it not?”