WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama sharply criticized the decision by his FBI director to alert Congress on Friday about the discovery of new emails related to the Hillary Clinton server case, implying that it violated investigative guidelines and trafficked in innuendo.
"We don't operate on incomplete information," Obama said in an interview with NowThis News. "We don't operate on leaks. We operate based on concrete decisions that are made."
"When this was investigated thoroughly the last time, the conclusion of the FBI, the conclusion of the Justice Department, the conclusion of repeated congressional investigations was that she had made some mistakes but that there wasn't anything there that was prosecutable," Obama said.
[After another release of documents, FBI finds itself caught in a partisan fray]
The president did not mention the FBI director, James B. Comey, but it was clear Obama was referring to him.
Declaring that he had "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," Obama nonetheless expressed confidence in Clinton.
"I trust her," he said. "I know her. And I wouldn't be supporting her if I didn't have absolute confidence in her integrity and her interest in making sure that young people have a better future."
White House officials later downplayed Obama's remarks about the FBI and insisted he had not meant to criticize Comey.
"The president went out of his way to say he wouldn't comment on any particular investigations," Eric Schultz, a White House spokesman, told reporters on Air Force One while Obama was en route to North Carolina to campaign for Clinton.
[Comey's role recalls J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, fairly or not]
Schultz characterized Obama's remarks as mirroring those made in recent days by the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, who had said that while the White House would not criticize Comey's decision to update Congress on the status of an ongoing investigation, Obama believed that rules intended to keep such investigations confidential were good ones and should be followed.
For the last several days, the FBI has been analyzing emails belonging to Huma Abedin, a top adviser to Clinton. Agents discovered the emails last month in an unrelated investigation into Abedin's estranged husband, the disgraced former congressman Anthony D. Weiner.
In a letter to Congress, Comey said those emails might be pertinent to the investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server. Authorities concluded that case in July with no charges. But the letter, sent over the objection of the Justice Department, led to controversy because it deviated from long-standing guidelines.
It is increasingly unlikely that agents will finish their work on the emails by Election Day, FBI officials said. They said there was a chance they could offer updates before next Tuesday.
The renewed interest in Clinton's emails — a matter she believed she had put behind her months ago — has exploded in the final days of the presidential campaign, with recent polls showing that the race is tightening. But Clinton remains ahead of her Republican challenger, Donald Trump, in most national polls to date.
Much is unknown about the new emails, including why they were on Weiner's laptop in the first place. Abedin, through her lawyers, has adamantly denied using that laptop, which people with knowledge of the matter have said was identified in court papers as a Dell model. People with knowledge of the matter have said that the emails may have ended up on the laptop because they were inadvertently backed up or downloaded onto an older computer and then transferred from the older computer to the laptop's hard drive when the older computer was replaced.
Obama first commented publicly on the investigation last year before the FBI had determined that neither Clinton nor her aides would face charges for mishandling classified information found on the secretary of state's private email server. The president's remarks angered FBI agents who said he was prejudging the investigation.
"I don't think it posed a national security problem," Obama said on "60 Minutes" on CBS in October 2015. He said it had been a mistake for Clinton to use a private email account when she was secretary of state, but his conclusion was unmistakable: "This is not a situation in which America's national security was endangered."
William K. Rashbaum contributed to this report from New York.