president obama isn<u+2019>t on the ballot tuesday, but you wouldn<u+2019>t know it from his lobbying for hillary clinton. on wednesday he even butted into his administration<u+2019>s legal process by implicitly criticizing his own fbi director for alerting congress to new evidence related to the investigation into mrs. clinton<u+2019>s emails. mr. obama didn<u+2019>t mention fbi director james comey by name when asked about the case. but he echoed the clinton campaign<u+2019>s rhetoric against mr. comey by saying in an interview with nowthis news that, <u+201c>i do think that there is a norm that when there are investigations, we don<u+2019>t operate on innuendo and we don<u+2019>t operate on incomplete information and we don<u+2019>t operate on leaks. we operate based on concrete decisions that are made.<u+201d> he then absolved mrs. clinton of wrongdoing, though he can<u+2019>t possibly know what the new evidence might be. <u+201c>when this was investigated thoroughly the last time, the conclusion of the fbi, the conclusion of the justice department, the conclusion of repeated congressional investigations was that she had made some mistakes but that there wasn<u+2019>t anything there that was prosecutable,<u+201d> mr. obama said. mr. obama was no doubt signaling voters to ignore the fbi news, but his comments are also a grossly inappropriate intervention in a criminal case. he did the same in october 2015 and april 2016 when he said mrs. clinton had no ill intent<u+2014>precisely the rationale mr. comey later used to exonerate mrs. clinton. liberal pundits these days are lamenting the end of political <u+201c>norms,<u+201d> but they<u+2019>d be more credible if they noticed that mr. obama is the leading offender.
obama knocks comey - wsj
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