Two separate ethics violation complaints have now been filed against Comey for his intervention in the election. One from the former White House ethics lawyer in the Bush administration.
There is growing opinion that his actions violated the Hatch Act and that the Office of Special Council may be initiating an investigation.
Legal scholars on both sides of the aisle have questioned why Comey announced the development, given the apparent lack of information and the surefire impact it would have so close to Election Day.
“The F.B.I.’s job is to investigate, not to influence the outcome of an election,” Painter, who was an ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House, wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Sunday.
“Such acts could also be prohibited under the Hatch Act, which bars the use of an official position to influence an election,” he added. “That is why the F.B.I. presumably would keep those aspects of an investigation confidential until after the election.”
On Saturday, Painter filed complaints with both the OSC and the Office of Government Ethics about Comey's letter to Congress.
The typical punishment for violations of the Hatch Act, Painter wrote, was loss of one’s job.
Meanwhile he was being far more coy about the information he had at hand, regarding Russian attempts to influence the election.
FBI Director James Comey argued privately that it was too close to Election Day for the United States government to name Russia as meddling in the U.S. election and ultimately ensured that the FBI’s name was not on the document that the U.S. government put out, a former FBI official tells CNBC.
…. According to the former official, Comey agreed with the conclusion the intelligence community came to: “A foreign power was trying to undermine the election. He believed it to be true, but was against putting it out before the election.” Comey’s position, this official said, was “if it is said, it shouldn’t come from the FBI, which as you’ll recall it did not.”
He will eventually have to resign, but it's unlikely he would do so prior to the election, as that would undermine the purpose of his partisan motivated action.
