Obama breaks silence on FBI probe into Hillary’s emails

Obama appeared to be critical of FBI director James B Comey in his remarks even as the White House refuted suggestions that the president gave any such impression. “I do think that there is a norm that, you know, when there are investigations, we don’t operate on innuendo. We don’t operate on incomplete information. We don’t operate on leaks. We operate based on concrete decisions that are made,” he said in first public comments after America’s top cop announced a renewed probe into a cache of recently discovered emails. Comey had said the emails may or may not be pertinent to an earlier investigation into Democratic presidential nominee Clinton’s handling of classified information. Obama said he has made a “very deliberate effort to make sure that I don’t look like I’m meddling” in what are supposed to be independent processes for making these assessments as he went on to make his veiled criticism of Comey’s handling of the issue without naming him. Democrats have questioned the agency’s motive behind its decision taken days before the November 8 election, and Clinton and her campaign have pressed Comey to put out the “full and complete facts” about the probe.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has denied that the Russian government was the source of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s emails that were published this year, a media report said on Thursday. “The Clinton camp has been able to project a hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything. Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false — we can say that the Russian government is not the source,” Assange told Russia’s RT News. Assange also accused the US presidential candidate of being a pawn of behind-the-scenes interests, and voiced doubts about her physical fitness to take charge of the White House.  “I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person, because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick — for example faint — as a result of going on, and going with their ambitions. But she represents a whole network of people, and a whole network of relationships with particular states,” the whistleblower said. Over the past nine months, WikiLeaks uploaded over 30,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server, while she was Secretary of State (2009-2013). This was followed by nearly 20,000 emails sent to and by members of the US Democratic National Committee, exposing the party leadership’s dismissive attitude towards Bernie Sanders, and his outsider primaries campaign.