Clinton and Comey to speak at separate events in Dublin on same day

Hillary Clinton and former FBI director James Comey, the man she claimed "shivved" her in the 2016 presidential election campaign, will speak at separate events in Dublin on the same day next week.

Mrs Clinton and her aides blame Mr Comey for her election defeat to Donald Trump over his reopening of an investigation into her use of an unsecured email in October 2016 - 11 days before the election.

Trinity College Dublin says the former US presidential candidate will receive an honorary degree from the university and deliver a public lecture at 12 noon on Friday, June 22nd.

Mrs Clinton will also speak with former president Mary Robinson, the chancellor of the university, in a conversation exploring her views on "democracy, women in politics and the current challenges facing American society," the college has said in a press release.

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Mr Comey will be speaking at a public interview less than a kilometre away at the Irish Film Institute in Temple Bar at 6pm that day as part of the promotional tour for his book, A Higher Loyalty.

He will be interviewed by Irish Times journalist Hugh Linehan about the election and his interactions with Mr Trump before he was sensationally fired by the US president, as detailed in his book.

In her 2017 memoir, What Happened, about her loss to Mr Trump in the 2016 election, Mrs Clinton wrote Mr Comey “shivved” - prison slang for stabbing a fellow inmate with a knife-like weapon - her three times over the final five months of the campaign when he made public statements about the investigation.

The Democratic candidate dropped in the polls after the October announcement in which Mr Comey said he was reopening the investigation after new information came to light. He closed it again days later, saying there was nothing new in the newly unearthed evidence to justify a criminal prosecution.

Earlier that year, in July 2016, Mr Comey had held a press conference to say that no criminal charges should be brought against Mrs Clinton over her handling of classified information when she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013 but rebuked her for being “extremely careless” in using a private email server.

The former FBI chief says in his book that the investigation into Mrs Clinton was potentially very serious, likening the fact that the FBI was "criminally investigating one of the two candidates for president of the United States during the campaign" to a "500-year flood."

Mr Comey defended his actions saying that his July press conference was the right thing to do to protect the reputation of the FBI, while he has argued that publicly re-opening the case shortly before the election was a no-win situation and he would have been accused of covering it up had he not.

“Speak or conceal - both terrible options,” he wrote in the book. Choosing between a “really bad” option and a “catastrophic” option was “not that hard a call,” he said.