In new details from her forthcoming book What Happened, Hillary Clinton discusses top adviser Huma Abedin and her team's reaction to the FBI's discovery in October 2016 of damaging emails as a result of a separate probe into Abedin's husband, Anthony Weiner.
The newly surfaced emails led then-FBI Director James Comey to reopen the bureau's investigation into Clinton's private email server days before the 2016 presidential election.
Months earlier in July, Comey had recommended no criminal charges against Clinton for her email practices while serving as secretary of state. Later that year, during a separate New York Police Department investigation into Weiner for sexting a 15-year-old girl, authorities discovered potentially sensitive documents on Weiner's computer connected to Abedin from her time working under Clinton at the State Department.
Upon the discovery of the new documents, the FBI announced in late October that it would investigate those emails, revisiting the probe into whether Clinton mishandled classified materials over her email server. The newly discovered emails revived the scandal, and many speculated at the time the development could have serious consequences for Clinton in the 2016 election.
Clinton reveals in her new memoir how her team reacted to the October news, writing that after learning the damaging emails were linked to Weiner's laptop, Abedin "burst into tears," the Daily Beast reported.
"When we heard this, Huma looked stricken," Clinton writes. "Anthony had already caused so much heartache. And now this."
"'This man is going to be the death of me,' [Abedin] said, bursting into tears."
Clinton repeatedly criticizes Comey in her book, at one point saying, "The FBI wasn't the Federal Bureau of IFs or Innuendos. Its job was to find out the facts. What the hell was Comey doing?"
Clinton further says she wishes her campaign "hit back hard" against Comey for overstepping his bounds during the 2016 presidential campaign.
"My team raised concerns with that kind of confrontational approach. In the end, we decided it would be better to just let it go and try to move on. Looking back, that was a mistake," she writes.
The FBI confirmed months later, in May 2017, that the emails in question contained classified information and were forwarded by Abedin to Weiner.