Donna Brazile on FBI Re-Opening Clinton Email Investigation: It’s ‘Like an 18-Wheeler Smacking into Us’

Top Democratic officials and advisers to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton are worried about the new attention being brought to the re-opening of the Clinton email investigation and worry about its impact on the election.

Clinton’s advisers fear that the attention devoted to the emails could affect her chances in the election as well as candidates in down-ballot House and Senate races.

“This is like an 18-wheeler smacking into us, and it just becomes a huge distraction at the worst possible time,” said Donna Brazile, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee to the New York Times.

The new FBI inquiry into Clinton’s emails comes from emails discovered on the computer of Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s estranged husband Anthony Weiner from a separate investigation looking into allegations of Weiner texting sexually-explicit messages to a teenager.

While agents reviewed files on Weiner’s computer, agents came across metadata — files that list to-and-from information for emails — and found tens of thousands of emails related to Clinton.

Clinton’s advisers did not make any changes in political strategy and stressed that the campaign will go on as planned with recent events.

But advisers did ask campaign surrogates in a conference call Friday that the following message be pushed forward: that the FBI investigation had not been reopened; that none of the new emails had emerged from Clinton; that the FBI had to release more details about its inquiry; and that they were concerned that James Comey had taken this action.