Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta believes forces within the FBI opposed to the Democratic nominee might have pushed agency Director James Comey to re-open an investigation into her private email server just 11 days before November's presidential election.
Asked at the NewCo Shift Forum in San Francisco earlier this month what he thought was behind Comey's move, since he earlier in the summer had announced he had closed the case, Podesta cited "two possibilities."
"There are at least forces within the FBI that wanted her to lose," Podesta told Bloomberg News' John Heilemann, who was moderating. "I'm not sure they really understood the alternative [a Donald Trump win], but they wanted her to lose."
The other possibility, he said, is the FBI, in his opinion, has "just become a cover-your-ass organization, and there was pressure coming up from underneath him [Comey], and he succumbed to that pressure, and he made a bad judgment."
Many Clinton supporters believe Comey's announcement negatively affected perceptions of Clinton and had a role in the election of Republican Donald Trump. Comey announced just two days before the election nothing was found in the new batch of emails, but critics said by then the damage was done.
"It's inexplicable," Podesta told Heilemann. "I think virtually anybody who has opined on the topic — including Republicans who served in both Bush administrations and the Reagan administration — have said it was a terrible mistake of judgment."
The move "did terrible damage to us," he said. "If you look at the polling at that period time, that's when the race began to tighten in that week."
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