The Comey effect: 10 years ago, an FBI news conference changed America

“It is hard to think of another single event in the last decade that has had such far-reaching and sweeping and unintended global consequences as Jim Comey’s press conference,” said one historian.

On the morning of July 5, 2016, the word went out to reporters on the Justice Department beat: Get down to FBI headquarters, the brutalist J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue.

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