Four years ago today, October 28, 2016, James Comey upended the 2016 presidential campaign, just 11 days before the election.

Today is the anniversary of the statement by FBI Director James Comey that the Bureau was looking into emails found on a laptop shared by Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her now ex-husband Anthony Weiner, who was in the midst of a federal investigation for sexual entanglements with a minor.

Seven days later, Comey would make another statement that nothing new was found on the laptop and that the emails in question had already been reviewed and cleared by the FBI, but the damage had already been done:  A week-long news cycle had already undermined the Clinton presidential campaign and ultimately gave us President Donald Trump.

Thankfully, even though republicans are trying the October laptop surprise again this year, voters are more skeptical of the election machinations Trump is trying to manufacture.

Let’s review how the GOP worked to subvert Clinton in the last two weeks of the 2016 election.  After having hours of Congressional testimony, including 11 hours by Clinton herself, about a private email server she used, republicans weren’t able to undercut Clinton’s campaign.  She still had a six-point lead in the polls, including in key swing states.

Then, Jason Chaffetz, the republican Utah Congressmen who led the House Oversight Committee released a tweet claiming the FBI had reopened the Clinton email case.  (In fact, the case had not been closed, but it was dormant because no new pertinent information had been discovered.  Chaffetz left office mid-term in 2017 and is now a Fox “News” personality who routinely fills in for Sean Hannity.)

FBI Dir just informed me, "The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation." Case reopened

— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) October 28, 2016

With the tweet, Chaffetz violated a number of norms regarding FBI investigations, particularly publicly disclosing the existence of them before evidence was collected and analyzed.  Chaffetz had also forced Comey’s hand:  he somehow caught wind of the emails on Abedin’s laptop and he had sent the FBI Director a letter “reminding” Comey that Comey had promised to give Congress an update on any new information discovered in the investigation.

When Comey responded that, yes, they were looking into additional information, Chaffetz jumped and released the information via tweet, claiming that it was “in the public interest” to know.

That night, Comey made his public statement about new information in the case.  One week later, he announced that there was no new information found.  But the damage was done.

In that week, Clinton’s lead in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin was cut in half.  According to RealClearPolitics, Clinton’s 5 percentage point lead on October 28th was cut to 2.8 on November 5th.  In Michigan, it went from 7 percentage points to 3.6.

The momentum had shifted, and while Clinton won the popular vote, Trump eked out an Electoral College victory thanks to 77,000 votes in three states.

Thankfully, 2020 is not 2016.  This year’s laptop scandal has to do with mysterious laptops “found” by a blind computer repairman in Delaware that the Trump media machine claims holds damning information about Hunter Biden.

There’s a rambling spider web of allegations from a self-proclaimed recruit of the Bidens, Tony Bobulinski, who has a confused tale of Chinese banks and Russian gas companies that supposedly paid the “BD family”–code, obviously, for Bidens–millions of dollars for something.

Trump tried giving this BS a national spotlight during the second presidential debate.  This conspiracy theory is so convoluted and “inside baseball,” though, no one but the most ardent QAnon supporters knew what he was talking about.  Even many Fox “News” viewers gave a collective “Huh?” as Bobulinski gave a six minute statement prior to the debate–just like Trump had a press conference with the women allegedly assaulted by Bill Clinton prior to the final debate in 2016.

But this manufactured outrage has no credibility.  Not only is it highly complex, it’s an obvious attempt to try to replicate the “magic” the 2016 Trump campaign found to pave a way to victory.  It’s formulaic, like Trump’s constant whining about the media and how unfair life has been to him.