Vice News reported today that the F.B.I. refused to acknowledge whether or not they were investigating Donald Trump when the F.B.I. director informed congress 11 days before the election of its investigation of Clinton’s emails.

In September, VICE News and Ryan Shapiro, a doctoral candidate at MIT and research affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, filed the FOIA lawsuit against the FBI demanding documents connected to a pair of incendiary comments Trump made on the campaign trail over the summer. In July, he called upon Russia to track down “30,000 emails [from Hillary Clinton’s private email server] that are missing.” And at an August campaign rally in North Carolina, he made a statement that was widely interpreted as calling for the assassination of Clinton.

We sought this information from the FBI after receiving a tip that the bureau, in addition to the Secret Service, was probing the incidents. We asked the FBI to grant us expedited processing because there was an urgent need to inform the public before they went to the polls on November 8.

But the FBI refused to respond to our request before the election, instead dating it Nov. 18; we received it in the mail Nov. 28.

“The nature of your request implicates investigative records the FBI may or may not compile pursuant to its broad criminal and national security investigative missions and functions,” said the bureau’s response, which is embedded at the end of this story. “Accordingly, the FBI cannot confirm or deny the existence of any such records about your subject as the mere acknowledgment of such records existence or nonexistence would in and of itself trigger foreseeable harm to agency interests.”

This is what’s known as a Glomar response, a term that came into use after the CIA denied a reporter’s request in the 1970s for information about a CIA ship, the Glomar Explorer, designed to recover a sunken Russian submarine. The agency refused to either confirm or deny the ship’s existence.

Both the Inquisitr and The Independent picked up on the story later in the day.

Inquisitr,”Post-Election Bombshell: FBI Was Investigating Donald Trump Too, But American People Were Only Informed About The Clinton Investigation.”

The Independent, “Was the FBI also investigating Trump when Comey made his shocking announcement?”