Trump: ‘We never thought we were going to say thank you to Anthony Weiner’

A reinvigorated Donald Trump thanked Anthony Weiner on Sunday for the disgraced former congressman’s apparent role in the discovery of emails that FBI Director James Comey said were “pertinent” to the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

“We never thought we were going to say thank you to Anthony Weiner,” Trump said in between prepared remarks at a rally in Las Vegas — one of three planned for the Republican nominee.

Comey sent a letter to Congress Friday announcing a review of the new emails discovered on a laptop belonging to Weiner — the estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin — during an FBI investigation into his alleged sexting with a 15-year-old girl.

Related: Clinton campaign blasts Comey’s letter as ‘strange,’ ‘unprecedented’

The Clinton campaign called Comey’s decision “strange” and “unprecedented” following a Yahoo News report on Saturday that FBI agents had not been able to review any of the newly discovered material because the bureau had not yet gotten a search warrant to read them.

“As far as we know now, Director Comey knows nothing about the content of these emails,” Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, Clinton’s running mate, said on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” “Why would you release information that is so incomplete when you haven’t even seen the material yourself? Eleven days before an election — why would you talk about an ongoing investigation? I just have no way of understanding these actions. They’re completely unprecedented. And that’s why I think he owes the American public more information.”

The Trump campaign has, predictably, welcomed Comey’s decision with open arms.

“The FBI director is keeping his word to the Congress that if new pertinent information came forward that justified the reopening of the case, that he would alert the Congress,” Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “He has done that.”

On ABC’s “This Week,” Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway sought to turn the FBI’s surprise review of Clinton’s emails into a rallying cry for undecided voters reluctant to pull the lever for the brash real estate mogul.

“[The] problem that Hillary Clinton and her never-ending scandalabra [is the one she] always has, which is: Do people trust her to always tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth?” Conway said. “She has a very casual relationship with the truth. And people already know that. For these undecided voters … they’re most concerned about her veracity and her dishonesty, and this simply doesn’t help.”

And Trump, predictably, has taken it a step further, accusing Clinton of covering up a crime.

“Hillary’s corruption shreds the principles on which our country was founded,” he said. “Her criminal action was willful, deliberate, intentional, and purposeful.”

In July, following an 11-month investigation, Comey concluded that while Clinton and her State Department colleagues were “extremely careless” in the handling of classified information, he could not find evidence they had broken any laws.