With less than two weeks to go before the presidential election, Hillary Clinton firmly told the FBI on Friday that this is no time to be coy, saying it must “immediately” reveal the “full and complete facts” of its review of newly discovered emails. “We are 11 days out from perhaps the most important national election of our lifetimes. Voting is already underway in our country. So the American people deserve to get the full and complete facts immediately,” Clinton told reporters during a brief, hastily arranged news conference in Iowa.
Everyone pretty much agrees that the newly discovered emails were found on a computer that belongs to former congressman Anthony Weiner as part of an investigation into sexually explicit messages he allegedly exchanged with a teenage girl. But Clinton herself couldn’t confirm that Friday night. “We’ve heard these rumors. We don’t know what to believe,” Clinton said. “That’s why it is incumbent upon the FBI to tell us what they’re talking about. Right now your guess is as good as mine, and I don’t think that’s good enough.”
The presidential candidate spoke to the press hours after it was revealed that FBI Director James Comey said in a letter to congressional leaders that “appropriate investigate steps” would be taken to determine whether newly discovered emails were pertinent to the closed investigation into Clinton’s private email server. Clinton’s campaign did not hide its anger at the current state of affairs. Campaign chairman John Podesta said it was “extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election.”
It isn’t just Democrats who are surprised by the turn of events and are demanding more information from the FBI. Even Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican who frequently criticizes Clinton, said the letter was “unsolicited and, quite honestly, surprising.” Grassley added that “Congress and the public deserve more context to properly assess what evidence the FBI has discovered and what it plans to do with it.”
In a letter to FBI employees reported by the Washington Post, Comey says he felt an “obligation” to tell Congress about the new problem “given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed.” But he also emphasized that “given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression.”
