Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) called Friday’s revelation that the FBI is probing a new batch of emails connected with Hillary Clinton’s private server not an October surprise but an “October betrayal.”
Boxer, who is retiring at the end of this Congress, told MSNBC on Monday that the betrayal is “of longstanding FBI protocol and Department of Justice protocol that you don’t weigh in with something like this a few days away from an election.”
Noting nearly a decade that she’s been chairman or the vice chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee, the senators said “we do not even answer complaints if it’s within 60 days of an election. ”
“So why is he stepping out on this? Why hasn’t he stepped out and given us an interim report on whether Donald Trump is involved with the Russian hacking of e-mails, here, when he actually called on them to do it? Why hasn’t he done that? Why hasn’t he gotten back on their prosecution of the Wall Street people? So it’s not fair,” she said.
The senator was shown clips of colleagues complimenting FBI Director James Comey in July when he announced that Clinton was not going to be prosecuted.
“One day, the people in my state can hold me in high esteem, and if I do something that’s wrong and unfair and biased, that would send my — the words about me plummeting in the wrong direction,” Boxer responded.
“This could be nothing more than the storage of all the e-mails that they’ve already looked at. This could be just all duplicated. Why not wait? Why not wait? And again, it’s protocol. We have it at the ethics committee. We have had it at Justice Department. You don’t put your finger on the scale. And here’s why it’s so critical. We are having an election that’s about the heart and soul of this country,” she continued. “Donald Trump, and admitted, frankly, a serial sex abuser, in his own words, a man who’s called women pigs and dogs and all the rest, he’s gone after veterans, disabled people, everybody, Mexican- Americans, immigrants, it doesn’t stop. And now we’re talking about something that really has no facts behind it.”
She added that “up until then, people thought great things about” Comey.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member