The good news is, FBI Director James Comey is aware of the intense criticism over his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. The bad news is that he dismisses that criticism and instead blames social media for the bad rap he gets.
Speaking at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event Wednesday, Comey blamed Twitter for creating a “monster of a bias” that is causing Americans to lose trust in government institutions like the FBI, Fox News reported.
“My children, again, discipline me not to go on Twitter because apparently people say bad things about me on Twitter,” Comey said. “But things like Twitter offer us the opportunity only to encounter views consistent with our own, 24 hours a day.”
“There’s an opportunity to feed that monster of a bias, that confirmation bias, all the time,” he continued. “So it accelerates that fractionalizing of our society, and it makes it much harder for people like me, like you, like the people in here, to speak reason to folks about our institutions.”
As for the Clinton email investigation — Comey declined to recommend an indictment against Clinton, even though he said she was “extremely careless” in handling classified information — the FBI director still insists there was no ‘there’ there, saying “we don’t carry water for somebody else.”
“I’m not going to talk about the email investigation but I see some of the things people say about this thing, I’m like, ‘really?’ But it becomes truth to so many people. And I don’t know how to un-ring that bell,” he said.
Comey again pointed to Twitter as the culprit in the federal government’s bad reputation.
“So I do think it’s become enormously challenging for people in institutions that depend upon the trust of the citizens to recapture trust where it’s been lost, explain ourselves in a way that allows them to resist demagoguery or the Twitterverse,” he said.
Source: BizPac Review
