ABC News(NEW YORK) — Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine called the FBI director’s announcement 11 days before the election of a review of new emails in the Hillary Clinton email investigation “extremely puzzling” and a “distraction.”
In an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, Kaine said FBI Director James Comey’s announcement of the review was a breach of Justice Department protocol. Comey sent a letter to congressional leaders on Friday announcing that newly-discovered emails were being reviewed in connection with the investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state. The emails were found during a separate investigation of former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide and adviser.
“It is just extremely puzzling,” Kaine said on This Week. “Why would you release information that is so incomplete when you haven’t even seen the material yourself? Eleven days before an election, why would you talk about an ongoing investigation? I just have no way of understanding these actions. They’re completely unprecedented. And that’s why I think [Comey] owes the American public more information.”
“Now this is an unprecedented move, as your folks were describing earlier, because it happens close to an election, which is in violation of normal Justice Department protocol and it involves talking about an ongoing investigation which also violates the protocol and as far as we know now, Director Comey knows nothing about the content of these emails. We don’t know whether they’re to or from Hillary at all,” Kaine added.
“And so this is a distraction, but look, we’re focused on winning this race over the next nine days,” he said.
The vice presidential nominee would not speculate on the contents of the newly-discovered emails and called on Comey to give a fuller account.
“These could be duplicates of what’s already been analyzed. They could be things that don’t have anything to do with Hillary Clinton. We can’t speculate about it,” Kaine said.
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