“Yet again, Hillary Clinton has nobody but herself to blame,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said. | Getty FBI brings GOP's White House hopes back to life The FBI's new foray into Clinton's emails diminished the party's pessimism over their nominee's chances.

When the FBI renewed its investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, it also gave Republicans new hope Trump could win the White House.

Dismal poll numbers had many in Trump's party doubtful about his presidential hopes and shifting resources in a bid to save the Senate. Then the FBI changed everything, announcing Friday afternoon it would reviewing additional materials related to the private email server Hillary Clinton used when she headed the State Department, reinvigorating disheartened Republicans with a shot in the arm.


“Yet again, Hillary Clinton has nobody but herself to blame,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement Friday. “This decision, long overdue, is the result of her reckless use of a private email server, and her refusal to be forthcoming with federal investigators. I renew my call for the Director of National Intelligence to suspend all classified briefings for Secretary Clinton until this matter is fully resolved.”

The late-October surprise comes 11 days before Election Day, as well as months after FBI Director James Comey announced at a news conference in July that Clinton and her staff's conduct fell short of criminal wrongdoing — though he did say they were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information."

In a Friday letter to congressional committee chairmen, Comey said the bureau had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to this investigation” from an unrelated case.

“I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they may contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation,” he wrote.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the upper chamber’s majority whip, was highly critical of the FBI’s decision to investigate new emails this late in the game. “Why if FBI doing this just 11 days before the election?” he tweeted.

But he also appeared optimistic that something would come of the FBI’s latest inquiry.

“Why would FBI reopen Hillary investigation unless there is evidence of more than ‘extreme carelessness’ in handling classified information?” he asked. Additional questions he posed to Twitter included whether the FBI would ask the Justice Department to convene a grand jury and what Attorney General Loretta Lynch would do if the FBI asked her to present new evidence to a grand jury.

In his missive to lawmakers, Comey emphasized that the FBI can neither “assess whether” the material will be significant nor guess how long it will take to complete. But House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy called for the bureau to move as quickly as possible.

He credited the FBI for showcasing Clinton’s “fundamental lack of judgment and disregard for protecting and handling of our nation’s highly classified secrets” and called on it “to conduct this investigation expeditiously, and thoroughly brief the American people of its findings in a completely transparent manner” in a statement.

Despite Comey’s insistence that he can’t guarantee the new emails’ significance, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus signaled that the FBI must have discovered something major.

“The FBI’s decision to reopen their criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s secret email server just eleven days before the election shows how serious this discovery must be,” he said. “This stunning development raises serious questions about what records may not have been turned over and why, and whether they show intent to violate the law.”

Clinton herself, though not directly commenting on the FBI's moves, noted at a Friday rally that Trump could still come back. "Donald Trump says he can still win," she said. "And you know? He is right."