Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Saturday that FBI Director James Comey should resign in the wake of controversy surrounding his bureau’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server, adding that President-elect Donald Trump should pardon Clinton.
Mukasey, who served under former President George W. Bush, insisted in an interview with CNN’s Michael Smerconish that Comey’s investigation “was mismanaged from the get-go.”
“He crossed several lines. I think it was not his function to call to question whether she should or should not be prosecuted. That was for the attorney general or her designee, and I think he went way out of his lane,” he said.
As for Comey’s controversial move to notify Congress 11 days before the election of newly discovered emails that were thought to be potentially related to Clinton’s server, Mukasey questioned his judgment.
“When he held the press conference — and remember that Secretary Clinton’s campaign billed that as a clean bill of health — he was exonerating her. Then he then felt he had to correct the record, there might be more. Then he had to re-correct the record. It was like watching a car gradually go out of control,” Mukasey said.
Asked by Smerconish if he felt the “big picture” solution should be that Comey hands in his resignation, Mukasey was clear.
“Big picture, I think probably so,” he said.
“And even bigger picture,” he continued, “we ought to get a complete soup-to-nuts account of what happened.”
Mukasey suggested that Trump could also help to finally close a chapter on the investigation.
“Maybe at the end of it, President Trump will pardon Secretary Clinton, which would be both poetic and prosaic justice, and we can all get onto things like the economy, Russia and Iran,” he said.