Donna Brazile on Hillary Clinton email investigation: ‘We’ve got to get back to the issues.’

The reopening of a probe into Hillary Clinton‘s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state took the political world by complete surprise on Friday.

“It caught all of us off-guard,” Interim Chair of the Democratic National Committee Donna Brazile revealed to Ari Rabin-Havt Monday. She heard the news while traveling back to Washington, D.C. after an event in Utah.

“On my way home, I was watching TV on the plane, which we can do on some flights, and I saw the revelation at 1:30 and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, what the hell is this?'” she explained. “It just came from nowhere.”

The investigation was reopened when new emails were found during an unrelated investigation into Anthony Weiner’s alleged sexting with underage girls. Brazile said over the weekend she took the opportunity to look over some of the “back and forth” with the F.B.I. and the Justice Department and determined that it was merely trumped-up drama.

“I concluded this: this is a lot of palace intrigue,” she said. “This is probably an opportunity for the F.B.I. or whoever to re-litigate some of the email controversy.”

Brazile said she doesn’t want this so-called controversy to overshadow the real issues at hand during the upcoming presidential election, adding that this type of drama is best reserved for Clinton’s opponent.

“I think by and large we should just continue to focus on our goal which is to tell the American people why Secretary Clinton and Senator Kaine have a plan to not just grow the economy, but to deal with income inequality, college tuition, racial justice issues,” Brazile said. “We’ve got to get back to the issues.”

She continued: “If we’re playing Donald Trump games, this is where you get into the controversy and you spend all day talking about either the harsh race or the controversy of the day. Unfortunately this is modern politics and this has been a very interesting dynamic in this political season because all I’m doing every day is talking about whatever the tick-tack is opposed to getting people out, getting them prepared and telling them what’s at stake in this election.”

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Photo credit: AP Photo/Paul Sancya