Comey Is Not the One Whose Unorthodox Actions Are Casting a Cloud over the Election, by Andrew C. McCarthy.

July: Comey has exonerated me! October: Comey is undermining our republic! …

The biggest coup for Clinton in the waning months of the campaign has been Comey’s decision not to prosecute her — a decision outside the responsibilities of the FBI director and publicly announced in a manner that contradicts law-enforcement protocols. There has been nothing more irregular, nothing that put law enforcement more in the service of politics, than that announcement. Yet, far from condemning it, Mrs. Clinton has worn it like a badge of honor since July. Indeed, she has contorted it into a wholesale exoneration, which it most certainly was not. …

Comey is the FBI director, not a Justice Department prosecutor, much less the attorney general. The FBI is not supposed to exercise prosecutorial discretion. The FBI is not supposed to decide whether the subject of a criminal investigation gets indicted. The FBI, moreover, is not obligated to make recommendations about prosecution at all; its recommendations, if it chooses to make them, are not binding on the Justice Department; and when it does make recommendations, it does so behind closed doors, not on the public record.

Yet, in the Clinton e-mails investigation, it was Comey who made the decision not to indict Clinton. Comey, furthermore, made the decision in the form of a public recommendation. In effect, it became The Decision because Attorney General Loretta Lynch had disgraced herself by furtively meeting with Mrs. Clinton’s husband a few days before Comey announced his recommendation. …

Now, suddenly, Mrs. Clinton is worried about law-enforcement interference in politics. …

As for the election, Mrs. Clinton is under the cloud of suspicion not because of Comey but because of her own egregious misconduct. She had no right to know back in July whether the investigation was closed. She has no right to know it now. Like any other criminal suspect, she simply has to wait . . . and wonder . . . and worry.

Now a computer that was synced to the Clinton server, probably with all the original emails, has been found by the FBI — Weiner’s laptop. Clinton’s staff very thoroughly deleted most of the emails on all computers known to the FBI in July, destroying laptops with hammers and using sophisticated techniques to make sure no trace of the emails remained on the computers they knew about. But they didn’t know about Weiner’s laptop.

Something pretty bad must have been found on Weiner’s computer for Comey to publicly reopen the case — with all the political pain and career risk that entails.