Washington: Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump celebrated the FBI’s decision to re-open its investigation into Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server, saying “perhaps finally justice will be done”.
While the real-estate mogul was making those remarks at a campaign event in Manchester, New Hampshire, the crowd chanted “lock her up!”
“I have great respect for the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and (the Justice Department) are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake they made,” Trump said, referring to the bureau’s decision in July not to recommend that the department pursue criminal charges against Clinton for her use of the private server for official business. The FBI arrived at that conclusion even though its probe revealed that the then-secretary of state and her aides had been “extremely careless” in handling classified information, Director James Comey said then.
“They are reopening the case into her criminal and illegal conduct that threatens the security of the US,” Trump told the crowd at the Radisson Hotel in downtown Manchester. “With that being said, the rest of my speech is going to be so boring,” Trump, who also will visit Maine and Iowa on Friday, joked at the rally.
The FBI’s decision to re-open the case, communicated in a letter Friday to the chairmen of several congressional committees, comes just 11 days before the November 8 presidential election.
“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of e-mails that appear pertinent to the investigation. 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 e-mails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation,” Comey wrote.
The FBI “cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant,” Comey told the committee chairmen.
The director said he could not offer a time-frame for completion of the review. The e-mail controversy erupted in 2015 when it was reported that Clinton had used a private e-mail account for official business throughout her 2009-2013 tenure as secretary of state.
The account operated over a private server located inside Bill and Hillary Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York.
