If Hillary Clinton still feels sore about former FBI Director James Comey’s now-infamous letter to lawmakers saying he was re-opening the probe into her use of private email server as secretary of state, she waved it off in a joking tweet posted on the one-year anniversary of that day.
Statistician and journalist Nate Silver took note of the anniversary on Saturday on Twitter, saying Comey’s letter “was probably decisive” in the 2016 presidential election. He linked to an article he wrote for his Five ThirtyEight website in May that said Clinton would “probably be president” had Comey chosen to not send the letter.
Clinton responded to Silver’s tweet two hours later, feigning nonchalance:
Her tweet has been liked more than 100,000 times and retweeted by more than 20,000 people.
It’s certainly unlikely that Clinton had forgotten the fateful date of Comey’s letter, which, Silver said in his article, “upended the news cycle and soon halved” her lead in the polls, “imperiling her position in the Electoral College.” Days later, Comey issued another letter saying the agency had not found anything new that would warrant charges against Clinton, but the political damage had been done with the election looming.
Clinton has repeatedly asserted her belief that Comey’s Oct. 28 letter cost her the presidency.
“If the election had been on Oct. 27, I’d be your president,” Clinton said at an event in May.
Earlier this month, she told CNN that she “would have won but for Jim Comey’s letter on Oct. 28.”
“I think every day that goes by, the evidence of that becomes clearer,” she said.
