George Conway is recommending Rachel Maddow!

Here's the series.  If I could only stand her voice.

I have to admit that I have a hard time listening to a lot of people - most people - for any length of time.  Which is why it's rare for me to find an audio book I can tolerate.  Amazingly, though, I've recently found two, both read by the respective authors, and both exceptionally easy to listen to.  It's the calming voices, I suspect, of Sarah Kendzior (The View from Flyover Country) and James Comey (A Higher Loyalty).  If you listen to Sarah on interviews, you won't believe me about the calming voice, but she reads beautifully.  And Comey always sounds soothing.

And speaking of Comey, I've gone back and forth in my opinion about him and how he handled the Clinton email fiasco, but after reading - or, rather, listening to - his book, I'm pretty well set now in that I think he's an honorable guy, with whom I don't always agree, but who was put in some seriously difficult situations during his time both as Deputy Attorney General under Bush 2 and as Director of the FBI under Obama and Trump.  (His book is actually quite interesting, to boot. It's not about Trump.  It's about Comey.)

I've decided I can accept Comey's behavior in the 2016 election days as well-reasoned and doing the best anyone could do with those circumstances.  (Including going public with an announcement regarding the completed investigation without the blessing of the Attorney General.  She had been compromised by meeting privately with Bill Clinton only days earlier.)

I'm okay with it all with one exception.  The reason they reopened the investigation into Hillary's emails when they came across more of them on Anthony Weiner's laptop was because there were some from her earliest days as Secretary of State that they believed they hadn't found and thought those might be on that laptop.  In his book, Comey says that if there were proof of Clinton intentionally and illegally using a private email account, it would likely be in those earliest emails.

What I don't understand then is how they could have closed out the investigation in the first place with the statement that Clinton had done nothing to warrant prosecution while at the same time believing the most likely evidence of wrongdoing would have been in those emails that they never found.  Comey's statement did mention there were "likely" other emails not found, but even when they reopened the case and found emails they hadn't found before, there may well have been incriminating emails still uncovered. Under those cricumstances, how could they definitely clear her?  Or, in Comey's words,  decide with "reasonable confidence there was no intentional misconduct."  (Also in his book, and something that may have helped them reach that conclusion, he says Clinton thought her emails were secure on her home server because her home was protected by Secret Service.  Really?  She thought the physical security of a server ensured eletronic security of her emails? How did she think those emails were getting to other people who weren't in her house?  I find that excuse extremely hard to believe.  OK, impossible to believe.  She's a smart lady.)

I know Comey accused Clinton of being "extremely careless," and I can buy that, too, but I don't recall ever hearing anything about there being a possibility that outstanding emails might prove otherwise, other than Trump asking Russia to look for the missing emails.

And a kind of part B to my objection: In the book, Comey says that he was informed about the emails on Weiner's laptop in early October.  He didn't ask the email investigation team (Operation Midyear) to check it out until late October.  Why?  He says, about first being informed of it:

"I don't remember the conversation clearly. I suspect that is because it seemed like a passing comment and the notion that Anthony Weiner's computer might connect to Midyear and Hillary Clinton made no sense to me."

I suppose he could have simply gone on to other things at the time, thinking the issue was closed and he was well rid of the nightmare.  But he also says that after not getting any word from him on what to do about it, the team asked for a meeting.  Why did they wait two or three weeks?

OK, one last thing:  they let Clinton's lawyers get away with sorting out what emails were personal and private and then deleting them.  Why weren't they required to retain them?

(Sorry, I had more than one objection after all.)

Here's a timeline of the key events at CNN.

And here's a Times analysis of a 500-page Inspector General's report investigating the investigation, which is not at all favorable to Comey, but ultimately concedes there were no grounds to prosecute Clinton.