President Donald Trump has confidence in FBI Director James Comey, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Wednesday, despite his tweet Tuesday saying that he had given Hillary Clinton "a free pass for many bad deeds" during the election.
"The president has confidence in the director," Spicer told reporters at the daily briefing, "but clearly his point was after the comments made yesterday, regarding the reason for the outcome of the election, he wanted to make clear what exactly happened."
Trump tweeted late Tuesday that Comey "was the best thing that had ever happened" to Clinton after she said had blamed the FBI director and Republicans for her loss in November.
"If the election had been on Oct. 27, I would be your president," the Democratic candidate told Christiane Amanpour of CNN.
"But I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey's letter on Oct. 28 — and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off."
In response, Trump slammed Clinton on Twitter for her comments and posed: "Perhaps Trump just ran a great campaign?"
Comey also defended his decision to disclose the email probe in nearly four hours of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
"To not speak about it would require an act of concealment in my view," Comey said. "Concealing, in my view, would be catastrophic."
Spicer declined to comment on whether Comey acted properly, telling reporters that "you play an election until Election Day.
"With all due respect to her, that's not how it works. You don't get to pick the day the election is on. It's set by the Constitution.
"The president won 306 electoral votes — and I think there's been plenty of analysis on the election and where people chose to spend their time and resources and their messaging.
"It's somewhat sad that we're still debating why the president won in the fashion that he did."
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