Hillary Clinton works to keep Donald Trump and emails at bay

Hillary Clinton on Sunday worked to campaign past the revived controversy around her email server, casting herself as a resilient fighter as Donald Trump intensified his sweeping claims of corruption in the American justice system.

Friday’s announcement by James Comey, the FBI director, of a new review of emails that may be linked to Clinton overshadowed the candidates’ usual messages over the weekend. The news threw Clinton and the Trump campaign into an unexpected debate over both her emails and Comey’s conduct, though only scant information has been made public about the substance of the FBI’s activities.

Campaigning in Florida, Clinton appeared to group Comey’s surprise role in the presidential race with the flurry of partisan attacks that often mark the last days of political campaigns. Without mentioning Comey by name, Clinton struck a defiant note. At a nightclub in Wilton Manors, she invoked her mother’s admonition to “never, ever quit.”

“We won’t be distracted, no matter what our opponents throw at us,” Clinton said. “We’re not going to be knocked off course. We know how much this election matters, and we know how many people are counting on us.”

At a black church in Fort Lauderdale, Clinton urged voters to turn out in force to vote in order to reject “a negative, hateful, bigoted vision” on the other side of the race.

If Clinton has aimed to stifle interest in her emails, Trump has seized on Comey’s announcement with exuberant glee.

At a rally on Sunday in Colorado, Trump called the disclosure a “big bombshell” and predicted it would lift him in the polls.

Having spent months criticizing both Comey and the Department of Justice for deciding not to press charges against Clinton for her use of a private email server, Trump redirected his attack on Sunday, going after Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Trump accused Lynch of corruption for failing to indict Clinton, claiming without evidence that Lynch had likely interfered with an investigation in the hope of retaining her job in a Clinton administration.

“Effectively, you’d call that a bribe, wouldn’t you?” Trump asked at a speech in Las Vegas.

Trump’s closest advisers stopped well short of his provocative claim. But on the Sunday news programs, allies of Trump, including his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, attempted to sow deeper doubts about Clinton’s trustworthiness without explicitly attacking the justice system.

Still, both sides — having scant information about what, exactly, Comey’s new review might entail — offered more insinuations than arguments with Election Day just nine days away.

The code word for Pence was “troubled” — a term he used freely on television to raise the notion, if not quite an accusation, that prosecutors had gone easy on Clinton.

“I’m one of millions of Americans that were troubled by that — why there’s this double standard when it comes to the Clintons,” Pence said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “I mean, no one is above the law.”

And for Clinton’s allies, the word of the day was “puzzled” — the descriptor top Clinton surrogates wielded repeatedly as they implied, without quite saying, that Comey had staged an unforgivable political intervention late in the presidential race.

“It’s just extremely puzzling,” said Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Clinton’s running mate, on “This Week” on ABC. “I just have no way of understanding these actions. They’re completely unprecedented and that’s why I think he owes the American public more information.”

<NEW> Federal investigators have obtained a warrant to begin searching the large cache of emails belonging to a top Clinton aide, law enforcement officials said Sunday, as prosecutors and FBI agents scrambled under intense public pressure to assess their significance before Election Day.

It remains unclear whether they can finish their work by then. “The process has begun,” a federal law enforcement official said.

The hurried pace at the Justice Department and FBI raises the prospect that law enforcement officials will again publicly discuss an ongoing investigation involving a presidential candidate in the final days of the campaign. Comey has faced extraordinary criticism since he sent an ambiguous letter to congressional leaders telling them that agents had discovered new emails.

Agents in an unrelated investigation of Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman, found the emails, belonging to his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, the aide to Clinton, earlier this month. That prompted a renewed interest among FBI agents who had investigated Clinton for her use of a private email server as secretary of state. That investigation centered on whether Clinton or her aides had mishandled classified information. Prosecutors concluded that case in July without bringing charges.

A federal law enforcement official said agents had discovered hundreds of thousands of Abedin’s emails on her husband’s computer, but investigators expected to examine only part of the total. Agents will have probable cause to search only the messages related to the Clinton investigation. Some of Abedin’s emails passed through Clinton’s private server, officials said, which means there is a high likelihood that the FBI has already read them.

Officials cautioned that there is no evidence to date that changes the Justice Department’s conclusion that neither Clinton nor her aides should be charged with any wrongdoing. They said it was possible that the review would turn up nothing, but said investigators felt obligated to check.

This story was originally published October 30, 2016 at 11:30 PM with the headline "Hillary Clinton works to keep Donald Trump and emails at bay."