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Leahy on new FBI investigation into Clinton’s emails

Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of State has dogged her campaign since early past year. Campaign manager Robby Mook called the report evidence of a “blatant double standard”.

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Clinton had been leading Donald Trump by around six points for around a month, and the New York Times’ Upshot blog gave her a 92 percent chance of winning the presidency.

A key metric in the U.S. presidential campaign now shows support for Hillary Clinton falling off a cliff and Donald Trump rising from the dead – in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Clinton’s lead has shrunk to a nail-biting 3.1 per cent, well within the margin of error for the polls it aggregates. In response, Manafort denied any wrongdoing and said Democrats were seeking to divert attention from the FBI investigation into Clinton’s e-mails.

The OSC Hatch Act unit, which usually experiences a surge in complaints during election years, has disciplined 84 employees the last five years, nearly a three-fold increase over the previous five years, an OSC 2015 report to Congress said. “This is presidential politics and nothing more”.

Ironically, one outcome of Mr. Comey’s earlier showboating is that the American public does not appreciate that most of the handcuffs put on FBI investigators-the lack of a grand jury, the insane immunity deals, the appearance of material witnesses (e.g., Heather Samuelson and Cheryl Mills) as counsel for Mrs. Clinton, the agreements to destroy laptops belonging to two Clinton aides-are areas where Justice, not the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has authority.

Mr Comey concluded in July that Mrs Clinton had been “extremely careless” in handling classified information, but there were no grounds for any charges.

FBI Director James Comey privately argued against having his bureau sign onto a statement saying the Russian government was meddling in the US election, CNBC first reported on Monday, citing “a former FBI official”.

“Without additional context, your disclosure is not fair to Congress, the American people, or Secretary Clinton”, Grassley wrote.

Even hawkish officials within the Justice Department who were urging an announcement blaming Russian Federation did not object to waiting for those negotiations to conclude.

Kadzik did not elaborate on the contents of the emails or whether they are pertinent, but added: “We hope this information is helpful”. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters that Obama will “neither defend nor criticize” his Federal Bureau of Investigation appointee, who was approved by the Senate, 93-1, for a 10-year term in September of 2013. “He’s in a tough spot”.

A person familiar with the investigation said the device that appears to be at the centre of the new review was a computer that belonged only to Mr Weiner and was not one he shared with Ms Abedin. It remains unclear, however, how much investigators can get done before November 8.

“At the same time, however, given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression”.

“We don’t know what they are”, the letter says.

Eighty-three percent of Democratic and Democrat-leaning voters in the poll termed the Comeny intervention a “distraction” in the presidential race.

Abedin said she had only accessed her clintonemail.com account through a web portal and that she “did not have a method for archiving her old emails prior to the transition”.

Democratic Congressmen Elijah Cummings (Maryland) and John Conyers (Michigan) also received the letter.

“If you delay the announcement, hopefully it’s not going to jeopardize an investigation, it’s not going to jeopardize the pursuit of justice, and voters will have the opportunity to vote on Election Day without information that may in fact be incomplete or untrue”, he said.

So the disclosure has many who know Mr. Comey and have worked with him wondering why he did it.

Columnist George Will left the Republican Party over Trump’s nomination, and said Republicans should “grit their teeth” under President Clinton and set their sights on 2020.

“Astonished by the all-out assault on Comey by Team Clinton”, she tweeted.

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Grassley acknowledged DOJ faced a hard decision about whether to disclose the new development, but said he was disappointed in Comey’s cryptic approach. “What he did was the right thing”.

Harry Reid accuses FBI Director James Comey of possibly violating federal law