“It’s a real headache,” one top Hillary Clinton adviser told me earlier this week, referring to the recent discovery of potentially classified e-mails on a computer shared by Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. The e-mails, disclosed in a letter written to Congress by F.B.I. director James Comey, have set off a veritable monsoon of anxiety, potentially preventing the Clinton campaign from entering the four-corners stage of its campaign while subsequently breathing some new life into Donald Trump’s once moribund operation.

Within Clintonworld, of course, the issue is even trickier since it involves Abedin, a beloved aide who has literally been by Clinton’s side for the past 20 years, from her stint as a White House intern during Bill Clinton’s administration, at age 19, through Clinton’s tenures as a U.S. senator and as secretary of state. Abedin is now vice-chairman of Clinton’s presidential campaign. “This is not about Huma’s e-mails,” a surrogate told me. “It’s about the e-mails generally. There’s a lot of things that got us to this point. But if Weiner hadn’t taken pictures of his weiner, we wouldn’t be in this thing.”

In Clintonworld, optics can be paramount. And Abedin, despite her centrality to the campaign, has been lying low since the news of Comey’s letter broke on Friday. She holed up in her Manhattan apartment over the weekend and she has not yet rejoined the campaign trail. “I can’t imagine they would put her on the road [now],” this surrogate continued. “That would be fucking stupid. She’s in the middle of an investigation.”

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Indeed, Abedin, whose political instincts were evidently displayed in the documentary Weiner, isn’t talking. Karen Dunn, her attorney at the prominent law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner, issued a statement to the media insisting that her client did nothing wrong. “From the beginning,” she noted, Abedin has “complied fully and voluntarily” with the inquiries into the e-mail maelstrom by the State Department and law-enforcement officials, including “sitting for hours-long interviews and providing her work-related and potentially work-related documents.” Dunn also noted that Abedin had only learned from press reports on Friday “of the possibility that a laptop belonging to Mr. Weiner could contain emails of hers.” She said her client would continue to be “forthcoming and cooperative,” but explained that the F.B.I. had not been in touch with Abedin or Dunn about the matter. (Asked for a comment, Nick Merrill, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, responded to me by e-mail, “Couldn’t possibly have less to say to you, but thanks for checking in.”)