Washington: Donald Trump thinks he knows scorched-earth tactics, but Hillary Clinton and her team are showing him the precision side of the art, with a surgical counter-attack on FBI director James Comey after Friday's sensational letter to Congress upended the Democrats' campaign.
Gifted with a campaign-saving opportunity by the FBI, Trump busied himself on Saturday with crude jokes about the penis of Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman and wife of Clinton's closest aide Huma Abedin.
More News Videos
Clinton: FBI letter on emails 'deeply troubling'
Hillary Clinton says FBI director James Comey's decision to notify Congress that it is looking into newly uncovered emails relating to her use of a private email server is "unprecedented" so close to an election.
On the other side of the aisle, marshalled by the Clinton campaign or of their own volition, an army of former Justice Department and FBI staff went on a sustained, 24-hour assault.
Clinton led a ferocious charge, telling a Saturday rally at Daytona Beach, Florida: "It's pretty strange to put something like that out with such little information, right before an election. In fact, it's not just strange; it's unprecedented and it is deeply troubling."
For the last week Clinton has been written up as the president-elect. Trump's campaign was sinking in a morass of his own making; Clinton almost certainly would be the next president; and while the Democrats were struggling to take control of the House, the Senate seemingly was theirs for the taking.
All that was thrown up in the air after a cryptic letter by Comey to a dozen or so chairmen of congressional committees, in which he revealed that a new trove of emails that might have passed through Clinton's controversial email server had been uncovered; and because they "appeared pertinent" to his earlier, now closed investigation into criminal wrongdoing by Clinton and her staff, they must be examined by his investigators.
That was it. No explanation of the process; of how long it might take; and seemingly no concern for the impact his letter might have with only days remaining in a bitterly contested election, despite his having cleared Clinton of any wrongdoing in July.
While Comey remained strangely silent on Saturday, Clinton and her surrogates accused the FBI chief of smearing her with unsubstantiated innuendo, at a point in the campaign when she had little time to counter it – all of which they argued violated Justice Department rules.
![FBI director James Comey has put himself at the heart of the presidential election.](/web/20161102101703im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/4/k/4/4/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gse1s8.png/1477860019473.jpg)
"We don't want it to knock us off our game. But on the second-to-last weekend of the race, we find ourselves having to tell voters, 'Keep your focus; keep your eyes on the prize'," said Donna Brazile, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.
Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta told reporters: "By providing selective information, [Comey] has allowed partisans to distort and exaggerate to inflict maximum political damage.
![Hillary Clinton goes on the attack at a rally in Daytona Beach, Florida.](/web/20161102101703im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/d/v/5/i/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gse1s8.png/1477965202008.jpg)
"There's no evidence of wrongdoing, no charge of wrongdoing, no indication that this is even about Hillary."
Attempting to go over Comey's head, a group of Democratic senators wrote to US Attorney-General Loretta Lynch, nominally Comey's boss, demanding details of the investigation, of the number of emails uncovered and an explanation of the extent to which they duplicate emails examined in Comey's earlier, year-long investigation.
![Delegates hold signs reading "Hillary For Prison" and "Lock Her Up" during the Republican National Convention in ...](/web/20161102101703im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/d/w/e/e/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gse1s8.png/1477815746493.jpg)
"Just 10 days before a presidential election, the American people deserve more disclosure without delay regarding the FBI's most recent announcement," the senators wrote. "Anything less would be irresponsible and a disservice to the American people."
Critical to the counter-attack was Comey's admission in an all-staff email circulated in the FBI on Friday that the agency had no sense of "the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails".
![Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who railed against the FBI's July decision not to recommend charges ...](/web/20161102101703im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/d/7/5/6/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gse1s8.png/1477815746493.jpg)
Justice Department officials revealed that the FBI director had been warned by senior officials, before sending his letter, that it was contrary to a long-standing policy requirement that information on investigations not be disclosed, particularly in the context of an election campaign.
"Director Comey understood our position. He heard it from Justice leadership," a Justice official said. "It was conveyed to the FBI, and Comey made an independent decision to alert the Hill. He is operating independently of the Justice Department. And he knows it."
![Federal law enforcement officials uncovered the new emails after seizing devices belonging to top Clinton confidante ...](/web/20161102101703im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/d/k/0/z/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gse1s8.png/1477860019781.jpg)
FBI officials countered, saying that Comey fully understood the policy, but he saw it more as "guidance" than an iron-clad rule – and not applicable to the "extraordinary situation" in which he found himself.
Insiders explained that Comey does not consider himself bound by the conventions of the Washington chains of command, all the more so because while Lynch is his boss, she was obliged to defer to the recommendations of the FBI after she had a controversial meeting with former president Bill Clinton in her departmental aircraft on the tarmac at an Arizona airport, in the days before Comey cleared Hillary Clinton back in July.
![Hillary Clinton speaks with Huma Abedin aboard the campaign plane to Iowa on Friday.](/web/20161102101703im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/d/k/0/e/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gse1s8.png/1477860019859.jpg)
"There's a longstanding policy of not doing anything that could influence an election," George Terwilliger III, a deputy attorney-general under George W Bush, told The New York Times. "Those guidelines exist for a reason. Sometimes, that makes for hard decisions. But bypassing them has consequences [and] there is a difference between being independent and flying solo."
Michael Vatis, a former senior Justice Department official, ventured that Comey might have been attempting to be transparent, but he added: "Transparency is not the foremost value in investigations. Fairness is.
"His statement has, quite predictably, been blown out of proportion and twisted into a signifier of some momentous discovery, when in fact, the new emails may turn out to reveal nothing new at all. That's not fair to Clinton."
Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University, said he was disturbed by Comey's conduct during this election season.
"Comey's July press conference was wrong, and now he has doubled down," he said. "The FBI's job is to gather information for and make a recommendation to [Justice Department] lawyers, not to hold press conferences and characterise the evidence. Tolerating that conduct from an FBI director sets a terrible precedent."
What might happen next is shrouded in mystery.
Legal experts in government and in private practice could only pose questions: would Comey offer a blow-by-blow account of the FBI's steps up to and after the election? Would he bother to explain himself? Or did he believe that having thrown a bomb, he could remain silent?
Some of his own staff were perplexed that he had revealed his hand, given the very preliminary nature of the investigation of the emails that were found to be in a computer owned by Antony Weiner, a disgraced former congressman and the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, a close aide and confidante of Hillary Clinton.
The emails inadvertently came to light in an investigation of Weiner's sexual liaison with a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina.
The FBI has yet to obtain court authority to gain access to the contents of the computer and so are not aware if any of the thousands of emails on the device were classified, whether or not any of them were sent by Clinton or if they were new or duplicates of the thousands of emails already examined by the FBI.
And FBI officials told reporters it was impossible that the Clinton aspect of the investigation would be resolved before the November 8 election.
Further complicating matters, Abedin has told people she is unsure how her emails could have ended up on a device she viewed as her estranged husband's computer.
Abedin had said she was not a regular user of the computer, and even when she agreed to turn over emails to the State Department for federal records purposes, her lawyers did not search it for materials, not believing any of her messages to be there, The Washington Post reported.
Trump could not resist how the story had come back to Weiner's sordid hang-up on computer sex.
Alluding to WikiLeaks' recent dumping of emails by Clinton's campaign chairman Podesta, Trump told a Saturday rally: "As Podesta said, [Clinton's] got bad instincts – well, she's got bad instincts when her emails are on Anthony Weiner's wherever."