President Barack Obama seemed to critique the FBI Director James Comey in an interview with Versha Sharma of NowThis, just days after a White House spokesman Josh Earnest declined to “defend nor criticize what Director Comey has decided to communicate to the public about this investigation.”

On Monday, Earnest said that Obama “believes that Director Comey is a man of integrity, he’s a man of principle, and he’s a man of good character” and that Obama “doesn’t believe that Director Comey is intentionally trying to influence the outcome of an election.  The President doesn’t believe that he’s secretly strategizing to benefit one candidate or one political party.”

In his interview, Obama said, “Well, you know, I’ve made a very deliberate effort to make sure that I don’t look like I’m meddling in what are supposed to be independent processes for making these assessments. Setting aside the particulars of this case, I know that [Hillary Clinton] is somebody who has always looked out for the interests of America and the American people first, and I do think that there is a norm that when there are investigations, we don’t operate on innuendo, we don’t operate on incomplete information, we don’t operate on leaks, we operate based on concrete decisions that are made.”

Obama concluded:

When this was investigated thoroughly the last time, the conclusion of the FBI, the conclusion of the Justice Department, the conclusion of repeated congressional investigations was that, you know, she had made some mistakes, but that there wasn’t anything there that was, you know, prosecutable.

Comey has been criticized by the Clinton campaign and its allies for informing Congress the FBI was investigating e-mails that were possibly related to its prior investigation. The e-mails were found on a computer shared by Clinton aide Huma Abedin and Abedin’s husband, former Rep. Anthony Wiener.

As many as 650,000 e-mails were found on the computer, which was discovered thanks to the FBI’s investigation of whether Weiner engaged in sexual communication with a 15-year old girl. In a letter to FBI employees, Comey — who had been informed of the e-mails late last week, a day before issuing his letter to Congress — was careful to note that while “we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations,” he felt “an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed.”

According to Comey, “I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record.” Comey closed by noting “we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails,” and explaining that his letter to Congress was an attempt “to strike” a “balance” despite “significant risk of being misunderstood…”