Hillary Clinton’s campaign thought they had a good talking point about the cache of mails that were revealed by FBI Director James Comey in his now infamous bombshell letter advising key members of Congress that the emails appear to be pertinent to the FBI investigation of the private email server Hillary used she was secretary of state. The talking point was simple and straight forward — release more details about the emails.

It seemed like a good response, at least until Republican vice-presidential nominee Gov. Mike Pence shot it down with his call for Huma Abedin, vice-chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and long time body woman for Hillary, to release the contents of emails now under scrutiny by the FBI.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Hillary’s campaign claims it can’t do that:

Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon and other representatives said that’s not possible.

“Only Comey possesses the laptop and knows its contents,” he tweeted. “Not possible for campaign to ‘get out ahead’ of story and release emails ourselves.”

Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said that’s the FBI’s job.

“Director Comey hasn’t said whose emails these are,” Mook also said on “Meet the Press.” “And so for us to take any action before he’s clarified or before anybody’s reached out to Huma Abedin from the Justice Department, that would be totally premature.” He also said that Abedin has already turned over all of her emails.

That doesn’t pass the smell test. What the Hillary campaign means is that they are afraid to tell Huma to release the emails to the FBI because there may be still more communications to or from Hillary that she tried to hide by using her private server in the first place.

Bloomberg Politics reports that the Clinton campaign “hopes its unusually swift response…will blunt the political damage.” Bloomberg also notes that this  “aggressive strategy contrasts with her bunker mentality in previous episodes of the controversy over her e-mail practices at the State Department.” All the same it fails in the face of Pence’s call to have Huma release the emails.