The Libertarian vice presidential nominee said Donald Trump “braying about this latest development” with the FBI and Hillary Clinton’s emails “reminds me of the guy in ‘Monty Python’ who says, ‘She’s a witch, burn her, burn her.'”
“It has no more content than that. And the point of that skit in ‘Monty Python’ was that those townspeople were ignorant and stupid, not that they were great,” former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld told CNN this morning.
Weld, a former U.S. attorney and onetime head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said he was not wearing a “candidate hat” but his former DOJ hat by expressing he’s “outraged by what’s going on here because it’s such a violation of Justice Department policies, procedures, whatever.”
He said the FBI’s moves — announcing the discovery of emails possibly pertinent to the investigation into Clinton’s private email server in a letter to Congress on Friday, followed by news that they’d gotten a warrant to look at the emails — have been “totally off the reservation.”
“It means that there’s no way for Mrs. Clinton to know what the evidentiary basis is on which they made this, you know, update to their investigation. And they’ve said themselves they don’t know it. So that just makes it all the more unreasonable to have waded into these waters in the first place,” Weld said.
The VP nominee, who agreed with the July decision not to bring charges against the Democratic presidential nominee, said he thinks Comey did it because “he just was concerned about criticism from Congress if it later turned out that three months from now one of those e-mails turned out to be relevant to his prior investigation.”
“I do think if he continues, and if there’s a, you know, a press conference or an update or a leak every sine day, somebody’s got to step in, either, you know, Attorney General Lynch has to do what she doesn’t want to do, which is order him to stand down. It’s just — it’s a real mess. And it’s a mess of his making,” he said.
Weld said Comey is “forwarding a gossamer thread, saying, ‘this might be something.'”
“We don’t know. Probably we definitely don’t think so now because we haven’t seen the e-mails. Now he announces, or someone announced, we got permission to look at the e-mails. They’re not even announcing we’ve looked at the e-mails. What’s it going to be tomorrow? We looked at an e-mail. There was nothing there, but tomorrow we’re going to look at another e-mail,” he added.
Weld’s running mate, Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson, told CNN on Friday that “obviously, the FBI didn’t do this lightly.”
“There has to be something there because you just don’t do this 11 days before the election knowing that you’re not going to be able to conclude the investigation in 11 days… when they dropped the criminal investigation, I think they were making a statement then that, look, they did not want a potential president-elect to be under criminal investigation,” the former New Mexico governor said. “But that’s what’s going to now be the case if she is elected. And she will control those jobs that controls how this issue moves forward, which points to a special prosecutor. Really, obviously, this is a mess. It’s mess.”
“I do think Trump is toast, so Hillary, moving forward as president-elect, four years of this — ugh,” Johnson added.
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