Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Saturday that "it might not be a bad idea" if FBI Director James Comey resigned amid an investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general of his handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe.
"The public has to have confidence in the chief law-enforcement officer — and I don't know that we can await the outcome of all of these investigations until we find out whether we can have that confidence," Mukasey, 75, who served under former President George W. Bush, told Uma Pemmaraju on Fox News.
"He has been compromised that much," he added. "It is his own, not that he has been compromised by his own people."
Inspector General Michael Horowitz announced his investigation Thursday into whether the FBI followed appropriate procedures in its inquiry into Clinton's private email use during her four years as secretary of state.
The review includes examining the agency's actions leading up to Comey's decision to announce findings of his probe on July 5.
He said then that Clinton and her top aides were "extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information" but that no charges should be pursued.
Comey then announced, just days before the Nov. 8 election, that he was re-opening — then again closing — the email investigation.
Democrats have charged that Comey's actions damaged Clinton's candidacy and helped Republican Donald Trump win the White House.
"Whatever position he is in, he's in having put himself there," Mukasey told Pemmaraju. "The handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails was done in a way that is unlike any criminal investigation that I have ever seen.
"It was not handled in the normal fashion. No grand jury was used. All sorts of irregularities.
"What's necessary is a complete top-to-bottom investigation, at least of the Clinton matter — so that we know what happened, we know how the investigation was conducted, we know where the shortcomings are," Mukasey added.
"The trouble is in the current atmosphere, his credibility within the FBI is somewhat compromised."
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