FBI Director James Comey had an outsize effect on media coverage right before the 2016 election

The closeness of the 2016 Presidential election — 78,000 votes in three states gave Donald Trump the victory — means that small things could have swung the result. So, too, could big things, like former FBI Director James Comey’s late-campaign revelation that the bureau had found new emails that might be relevant to the server investigation. They weren’t, but the announcement resuscitated the subject right as voters were about to head to the polls. However, the inspector general’s report reinforces an unimportant point about this response to the 2016 election. “But her emails” is largely a carry-over from the drumbeat of stories beginning in spring 2015 first about the existence of her server and, then, about the slow release of the emails that Hillary Clinton had turned over to the State Department. Each new batch of messages prompted a new set of stories, dipping into subtle, often unimportant details. 

What’s inescapable, though, is the effect of that last-minute announcement from Comey about the discovery of new emails. The Internet Archive’s database of closed captioning from TV news broadcasts shows how dominant Comey was in the last week or so of the campaign. The WikiLeaks releases of emails stolen from Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta got a lot of mentions — a tangent to the “Clinton emails” discussion that was often treated erroneously as a subset of it — but nothing matched Comey on sheer volume over the last few days of the campaign. Not the “Access Hollywood” tape. Not Russia, in the context of Trump. Comey. “