After months of right-wing caterwauling that Clinton’s email use constituted a criminal scheme, Comey announced in July 2016 that Clinton would not be charged in light of the FBI’s probe of her use of a private server. “Although there is evidence of potential violations regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” he said.

The story took on new life on October 28, 2016, when Comey stated in a letter to Congress that the bureau planned to review additional emails that “appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into Clinton’s server. They weren’t: In a second letter nine days later, Comey wrote that the review had been completed and did not change his previous conclusion that Clinton had not violated the law (the emails turned out to be nearly all duplicates the bureau had already seen).

But Comey’s initial missive, coming less than two weeks before Election Day 2016, spurred a massive firestorm of negative media coverage of Clinton while crowding out negative media coverage of Trump — not to mention policy. 

In a study conducted in November 2016, Media Matters found that the five newspapers we reviewed ran 100 stories that mentioned Clinton’s server in the week following Comey’s letter — 46 of which ran on the front page. The New York Times led the way with 15 front-page articles and 37 total articles that mentioned the server.

Election experts say Comey’s letter — and the apocalyptic, all-consuming response it received from major news outlets — likely cost Clinton the presidency and delivered it to Trump.

Smith’s filing should be a bigger story than Comey’s letter. 

Trump faces a federal criminal trial, not a revived probe that had previously ended without prosecution. 

He is accused of “a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results” based on “knowingly false claims of election fraud” which culminated in the storming of the U.S. Capitol, not federal records management (at least not in this indictment). 

And the filing contains previously unreported and damning details about his conduct, not vague claims about the existence of evidence that may or may not be consequential.

But when Media Matters reran our study to review how the same five newspapers had reported on Trump’s indictment following the unsealing of the new filing, we found their coverage was relatively scanty. 

The papers combined to run just 26 print stories that mentioned Trump’s indictment over the following week — only 7 of which ran on the front page.

None of the papers ran even half as many Trump indictment stories as they did on Clinton’s server. Indeed, every paper ran more front-page stories that mentioned Clinton’s server as they did total stories that referenced Trump’s indictment.

The Times, which flooded the paper with 37 Clinton server articles after Comey’s letter and put 15 on the front page, published only 9 articles that referenced Trump’s indictment — and only 2 on the front page — in the week after Smith’s filing.

The former president continues to benefit from news outlets grading him on a massive curve, resulting in relatively muted coverage for his nakedly authoritarian, unfathomably racist, and allegedly criminal behavior.

Media Matters searched print articles in the Factiva database from the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post for any of the terms “Trump,” “former president,” “Smith,” “Chutkan,” “judge,” “Jan,” “January,” Capitol," “federal,” “2020,” “special counsel,” “Department of Justice,” “Justice Department,” “DOJ,” or “Garland” or any variation of the term “elect” within roughly the same paragraph as any of the terms “evidence,” “immunity,” “fraud,” “denial,” “case,” “court,” “2020,” or “brief” or any variation of any of the terms “indict,” “defraud,” “filing,” “interfere,” “subvert,” “elect,” “obstruct,” “allegation,” or “allege” from October 3, 2024, the day after Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed new evidence in special counsel Jack Smith's indictment of former president and GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, through October 9, 2024.

We included articles, which we defined as instances when special counsel Jack Smith's indictment of Trump on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results was mentioned anywhere in the text in any section of the paper. We included editorial and op-eds but not letters to the editor.