John Podesta: Comey may have bowed to pressure from anti-Clinton FBI officials

Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman speculated on two possibilities to explain why FBI Director James Comey revealed a renewed investigation of the Democratic candidate's emails just days before the election.

John Podesta may be the first senior Clinton campaign official to suggest on the record that FBI officials may have deliberately worked to defeat the Democratic candidate, reported the Washington Post.

"I think there’s sort of two possibilities," Podesta told John Heilemann, the co-managing editor of Bloomberg Politics. "There are at least forces within the FBI that wanted her to lose. I’m not sure they really understood the alternative, but they wanted her to lose. I think that’s one possibility."

"I think the other is it’s just become a cover-your-ass organization, and there was pressure coming up from underneath (Comey), and he succumbed to that pressure," Podesta continued. "But he made a bad judgment, and I think virtually anybody who has opined on the topic — including Republicans who served in both Bush administrations and the Reagan administration — have said it was a terrible mistake of judgment. And I think it did terrible damage to us. If you look at the polling at that period time, that’s when the race began to tighten in that week."