Hillary Clinton maintains in public she’s not worried FBI Director James. B. Comey’s letter to Congress this week will affect the 2016 election, but her campaign and its allies are treating news that federal investigators have found additional emails possibly related to her private homebrew server as an emergency event.
“You know, I think people a long time ago made up their minds about the emails. I think that’s factored in to what people think and now they’re choosing a president,” the Democratic nominee said at a press conference Friday evening as she downplayed a story that had dominated the day’s news cycle.
Her campaign and its surrogates, however, have struck a very different tone
Campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters Saturday morning it “is a very concerning situation.”
Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta characterized Comey’s letter as “light on facts” and “heavy on innuendo.”
Democratic National Committee interim chairwoman Donna Brazile said separately that it was an “irresponsible action” for the FBI director to send the note to lawmakers, and she also called the letter “vague.”
Comey informed Democratic and Republican lawmakers this week that his agency had turned up additional emails possibly related to the private, unauthorized server Clinton maintained when she worked at the State Department.
The news came months after Comey seemingly closed the agency’s investigation of Clinton’s private servers in July when he recommended that no charges be brought against the Democratic nominee.
The additional emails mentioned this week were found during the FBI’s review of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, who is under federal investigation for allegedly sexting a minor.
Weiner shared the laptop with his estranged wife and Clinton’s longtime aide, Huma Abedin.
The laptop may contain as many as 1,000 emails, which FBI agents are checking now to see if they’re related to official government work, if they’re are classified, or if they’re simply duplicates of emails authorities already processed, the Washington Post reported.
However, details regarding how the FBI found the additional emails, and what the agency plans to do going forward, were muddied immediately Friday afternoon by a single tweet from Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, who chairs the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Moments after lawmakers received Comey’s letter , Chaffetz said inaccurately on social media, “FBI Dir just informed me, ‘The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.’ Case reopened.”
The Clinton email investigation has not been “reopened,” technically speaking.
Clinton, her aides and her traveling press corps were in the air Friday en route to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, when news of Comey’s letter broke. They had limited WiFi access, and many were out of the loop until touchdown. As a likely result of being in the dark for the breaking portion of the news cycle, Clinton’s team was slow to respond to the story.
By 6:00 pm Friday evening, however, the Clinton campaign seemingly settled on a simple strategy: Go on the offensive and demand Comey come forward with more information.
“It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election,” Podesta said in a lengthy, seemingly angry statement “The Director owes it to the American people to immediately provide the full details of what he is now examining.”
Brazile was not far behind, and she issued a statement of her own, stating, “At the very least, Director Comey must immediately address the serious outstanding questions over what, precisely his letter means, and what action or actions his agency plans to take.”
Later that evening, Clinton’s press secretary, Brian Fallon, appeared on MSNBC to repeat the call for greater transparency from Comey.
“[I]t is incumbent on Director Comey and the FBI to go further than what is contained in this letter, hold another press conference if that’s what it takes,” he said.
The Democratic nominee’s team then held a conference call at 8:00 am Saturday morning to discuss how best to handle the FBI story.
Later that same morning, Mook and Podesta hosted a call with reporters to reiterate the campaign’s position that it wants Comey to come forward with more information. The two senior Clinton staffers also fielded questions from media.
“[T]he more information that comes out, the more overblown this entire situation seems to be,” Mook told reporters. “That, in turn, has raised more questions about Director Comey from his colleagues in law enforcement circles to take this extraordinary step 11 days out from the presidential election.”
Mook and Podesta were not the only ones who hosted damage control-related calls this weekend with media.
Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, including Reps. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., and Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M., held a press call Saturday afternoon to call on Comey to “release more details about the letter he sent to Congress merely 11 days before election day.”
They said prior to the call, “[The] Trump campaign is trying to take this election by turning this letter into something it is not. On the call, CHC members will urge the FBI to release any and all relevant facts concerning its review.”
Later that same afternoon, the Congressional Black Caucus and a coalition of Democratic Mayors hosted a call in which they also stressed that, “the FBI cleared Secretary Clinton of any intentional wrongdoing in July.”
That call included Reps. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, and Barbara Lee, D-Calif., as well as former Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman, and former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer.
The Clinton campaign also put out a statement Saturday asserting that the supposed FBI “bombshell” had “fizzled out.”
“[L]ike most ‘bombshell’ discoveries about Clinton over the course of this campaign, it fizzled rapidly as facts actually became available,” the campaign said in a statement.
As Democratic operatives went to work Saturday dismissing the FBI letter and questioning whether Comey had acted as a partisan, Clinton spoke at a campaign rally in Daytona Beach, Fla., in which she took both routes: She downplayed the story and she took aim at Comey.
“It is pretty strange, it is pretty strange to put out something like that with such little information right before an election,” she told voters as they angrily booed the mention of the FBI letter.
“In fact,” she added, “It’s not just strange. It is unprecedented and it is deeply troubling. Voters deserve to to get the full and complete facts. So we have called on Director Comey to explain everything right away. Put it all out on the table.”
