“It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election. The Director owes it to the American people to immediately provide the full details of what he is now examining. We are confident this will not produce any conclusions different from the one the FBI reached in July,” the Clinton Campaign chairman John Podesta said in a strongly worded statement last afternoon.
The Clinton Campaign was taken aback when it learned from the US media that the FBI Director James Comey has written a letter to top Congressional leaders informing that it has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to its investigation in to the use of private server and personal emails by Clinton, when she was the Secretary of State from 2009-2012, in the first term of the Obama Administration.
“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to this investigation,” Comey wrote in a letter to several House committee chairmen. Comey was briefed on the issue on Thursday.
“I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation,” he said.
Neither the State Department or the White House knew about the latest move by the FBI, until the letter was leaked to the media by a Republican leader in the Congress who was one of its recipient.
However, Clinton’s Republican rival Donald Trump, who has been trailing in the elections, declared the development as a “Big Day” and bigger than “Watergate” scandal.
It took a few hours for Clinton Campaign to respond to the FBI’s decision, which more than three months ago had determined that there is no need to file a legal case against the former Secretary of State.
“Upon completing this investigation more than three months ago, FBI Director Comey declared no reasonable prosecutor would move forward with a case like this and added that it was not even a close call,” Podesta said.
“In the months since, Donald Trump and his Republican allies have been baselessly second-guessing the FBI and, in both public and private, browbeating the career officials there to revisit their conclusion in a desperate attempt to harm Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign,” he alleged.
“FBI Director Comey should immediately provide the American public more information than is contained in the letter he sent to eight Republican committee chairmen,” Podesta demanded. .
PTI