Donald Trump changes tune on FBI with new look at Hillary Clinton email case
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa -- As Donald Trump walked off the stage in Cedar Rapids, delivering his shortest stump speech in weeks, fireworks illuminated the sky for his supporters. The show of jubilance capped a day in which the GOP nominee was positively gleeful in multiple campaign stops in three different states, after the race for the White House lurched again - this time due to revelations that the FBI had found more emails that appeared to be relevant to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.
“The FBI would never have reopened this case, at this time, unless it were a most egregious criminal offense,” Trump said. “As you know I’ve had plenty of words about the FBI lately, but I give them great credit for having the courage to right this horrible wrong. Justice will prevail.”
Trump had been scathingly critical of the FBI as recently as Friday morning. Before the story broke, in an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier, Trump said, “The system is rigged when Hillary Clinton is allowed to run for president. Because what she did is criminal…And the FBI rolled over and the Department of Justice rolled over.”
On Thursday night, Trump, in another interview with Fox News, said to Bill O’Reilly, “I think the biggest rigging of all is what has happened with the FBI and the Justice Department with respect to Hillary Clinton.”
Trump quickly changed his tune Friday afternoon, and at his first rally of the day in Manchester, New Hampshire, Trump said, “But – what I’ve just announced, previously, it might not be as rigged as I thought. Right?”
His suspicion of the system may even go beyond Clinton’s email server. In an interview with radio host Wayne Allyn Root on Wednesday, Trump said, “First of all, the polls have taken a big, big turn over the last day,” after weeks of saying the polls themselves are rigged against him.
For the Republican nominee, good news for his campaign was a badly needed shift. The most recent fundraising filings showed that donor checkbooks were drying up for Trump, while Clinton’s fundraising remained strong. The real estate mogul wrote a $10 million check to his own campaign to buoy his efforts in the final dash. Poll numbers, both statewide and nationally, seemed to be showing a race that had slipped out of Trump’s grasp. And suddenly, it was Clinton’s campaign that is reeling.
Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, found out about the FBI’s discovery of additional emails related to Clinton in the middle of an interview with Yahoo News.
“That is superb,” Conway said. “That is extraordinary news for the American people because they deserve to know everything.”
As Trump took the stage in Manchester, he said, “I need to open with a very critical breaking news announcement.”
Immediately, the crowd at the downtown Radisson hotel burst into applause. By then, word had spread, and Trump’s supporters celebrated. Trump went on to say that he was “very proud that the FBI was willing to do this, actually. Really. Very proud,” just hours after telling Baier that the FBI “let her off.” Trump even said that his own advisers told him he could “skip [his] speech in New Hampshire. This is so big.”
From Manchester, he went north to Lisbon, Maine. By then, the news had broken that the FBI investigation was related to former Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-New York, who had separated from top Clinton aide Huma Abedin after more revelations of sexting had emerged. Weiner has been a frequent target of Trump for years, but somewhat surprisingly, even after Weiner’s name was plastered again on the airwaves, Trump did not mention him once in any of his three campaign stops.
Instead, the freewheeling Trump, clearly in a good mood, went off prompter to interact with the crowd. He quizzed rally-goers on how many trillions the United States was in debt and how much it had increased under President Obama’s two terms. He went on a riff about his new catchphrase, “Drain The Swamp,” and how it was analogous to Frank Sinatra.
In Trump’s telling, “I tell people I didn’t like that impression. That phrase. But everybody else did in the whole world. It’s all over the world now. It’s trending.”
“All of a sudden, you start to like it,” he said. “You know, Frank Sinatra was really sort of a friend of mine in a sense and he didn’t like ‘My Way.’ But he got to like it after singing it for about – two times when it went to number one.”
His unusual restraint on Weiner was surprising, given what Trump has said about Weiner’s potential exposure to sensitive information in the past.
In late August, in an interview with “Fox and Friends,” Trump said, “[Abedin] knows more about Hillary than Hillary knows and she’s married to a pervert, sleaze named Anthony Weiner who will send anything that he has out over Twitter or any other form of getting it out. I mean she’s married to Anthony Weiner! She knows everything that Hillary Clinton is doing. And she’s married to a guy that has no control over himself.”
When Abedin and Weiner announced they were separating, Trump released a statement that said, in part, “I only worry for the country in that Hillary Clinton was careless and negligent in allowing Weiner to have such close proximity to highly classified information. Who knows what he learned and who he told?”
Even before Trump was the official Republican nominee, Trump went after Weiner, saying at a rally in Redding, California, in June, “How would you like Anthony Weiner to be having all these secrets? Well, guess what? She tells Anthony Weiner everything there is. I know Anthony Weiner, I don’t want him knowing anything folks. OK? And I never ever want him to tweet me.“
Whether Friday’s jolt of the presidential race comes too late for Trump remains to be seen. However, Trump, as is typical, was brimming with renewed confidence, telling the New York Times late Friday, “this changes everything.”