Day: January 24, 2024

In a last-ditch effort, the FBI will now comb through 650,000 emails found on Anthony Weiner’s computer during a sexting probe to look for a batch that might be linked to Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

And in a head-scratching twist, reports Sunday said FBI agents learned of the emails on a computer belonging to Weiner — the estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin — in early October but did not brief FBI Director James Comey until late last week. That chronology raises questions about his role in potentially upending the already chaotic presidential race.

The 11th-hour reopening of a probe that supposedly ended in July when Comey cleared the Democratic nominee of any criminal wrongdoing but criticized her for being “extremely careless” with the use of a private server rocked the campaign and caused Clinton aides to question whether the FBI chief was taking political sides.

“Your actions in recent months have demonstrated a disturbing double standard for the treatment of sensitive information, with what appears to be a closer intent to aid one political party over another,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) railed in a scathing letter to Comey, a Republican who was nominated to lead the FBI by President Obama.

“Through your partisan action, you may have broken the law,” Reid added, referring to the Hatch Act, which bars federal officials from using their official authority to influence an election.

Reid also claimed that Comey had sat on “explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump … and the Russian government” while simultaneously “tarring Secretary Clinton with thin innuendo.

“You rushed to take this step 11 days before a presidential election, despite the fact that for all you know, the information you possess could be entirely duplicative of the information you already examined which exonerated Secretary Clinton,” Reid wrote.

Later on Sunday, Congressman Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) echoed Reid’s claim that the FBI director violated the Hatch Act by issuing a congressional memo lacking “a spect of information” and demanded Comey resign for the good of the nation.

Hillary Clinton finds herself neck-and-neck with GOP candidate Donald Trump as Election Day approaches.

“Director Comey stated in the letter that he had no idea of ‘the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails’ which makes his decision all the more disturbing.”

Former Attorney General Eric Holder signed a critical open letter alongside dozens of former federal prosecutors questioning Comey’s “troubling” actions for veering away from the agency’s “widely-respected, non-partisan traditions” — and imploring an investigation.

“The American people deserve all the facts, and fairness dictates releasing information that provides a full and completely picture regarding the materials at hands,” the letter states.

Earlier, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta ripped Comey’s handling of the matter as “inappropriate” and urged him to be more transparent because the disclosure came “in the middle of the presidential campaign so close to the voting.

“We would have preferred that that not happen, but now that it has happened, we would prefer that Mr. Comey come forward and explain why he took that unprecedented step,” Podesta said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine characterized Comey’s actions as “extremely puzzling” and called on the FBI to reveal more information.

“Director Comey knows nothing about the content of these emails. We don’t know whether they’re to or from Hillary at all,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” “If he hasn’t seen the emails, I mean, they need to make that completely plain. Then they should work to see the emails and release the circumstances of those once they have done that analysis.”

According to reports in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, FBI agents learned of the existence of the new laptop in early October, during their investigation into Weiner allegedly exchanging sexually lewd messages with a 15-year-old North Carolina girl.

Comey was not briefed on the new discovery until Thursday, The Post reported, a critical update that prompted him the very next day — just 11 days before the election and reportedly against directives from the Department of Justice — to notify key congressional committees that he would reopen the case.

Part of the delay, The Wall Street Journal reported, was due to the fact that FBI agents had to wait for the proper court orders and warrants to look at the Clinton-related emails, because they discovered them as part of a separate investigation.

The FBI finally obtained the proper warrants on Sunday evening, CBS News reported, meaning the work in sorting through the hundreds of thousands of emails has only just begun.

Thousands of emails on the computer may have been sent to or from the private Clinton server the FBI examined in its original investigation to Weiner’s computer, The Wall Street Journal reported.

But the sheer volume of emails that agents will now have to review — just to determine which are duplicates of emails they’ve already looked at and whether any contain classified information — will ensure that the latest stage of the probe will not end until after the Nov. 8 election.

The Clinton camp maintained Sunday they felt that the newly discovered emails had already been looked over as part of the organization’s earlier probe into Clinton’s emails.

James Comey has ignited outcries from both sides of the aisle with his eleventh-hour bombshell.

“If these are emails from Huma Abedin, we don’t know if they are, but if they are, we assume they’d have to be redundant because she already turned over all of her emails,” Mook said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Abedin herself, who separated from Weiner in August, reportedly said she had no knowledge that any of her emails would have been on that computer, according to CBS News.

That laptop, sources told the network, belonged to Weiner and was not shared with Abedin.

In prior sworn testimony from earlier this year, Abedin had said she’d provided the FBI with all devices she used for email related to the State Department.

The latest developments even shocked Donald Trump’s camp, which blasted the bureau’s chief for not having handled the initial probe well.

But one member of the GOP nominee’s camp gloated over the twist: Trump himself. “We never thought we were going to say thank you to Anthony Weiner,” he said at a Las Vegas rally.

With Nicole Hensley

Video

transcript

Clinton Addresses New Email Inquiry

Hillary Clinton called on the F.B.I. to clarify the details of its investigation, saying voters deserve to get the “full and complete facts.”

I have now seen Director Comey’s (FBI Director James Comey) letter to Congress. We are 11 days out from perhaps the most important national election of our lifetimes. Voting is already underway in our country. So the American people deserve to get the full and complete facts immediately. The Director himself has said he doesn’t know whether the emails referenced in his letter are significant or not. I’m confident, whatever they are, will not change the conclusion reached in July. Therefore it’s imperative that the Bureau (referring to the FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigations) explain this issue and question whatever it is without any delay. So I look forward to moving forward, to focus on the important challenges facing the American people, winning on November 8th and working with all Americans to build a better future for our country. Thank you.”

Hillary Clinton called on the F.B.I. to clarify the details of its investigation, saying voters deserve to get the “full and complete facts.”CreditCredit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

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Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton on the campaign’s plane on Friday.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

Q: Did the FBI wait until after the 2016 election to review the Hillary Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop?

A: No. A viral story misinterprets an FBI document and ignores widely reported facts.

FULL ANSWER

Citing a recently released FBI document, a viral story misleads readers by claiming that the emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that were found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop weren’t “reviewed” by an FBI investigator until after the 2016 election.

The FB News Cycle story claims that the document proves that now-fired FBI agent Peter Strzok “buried evidence of HRC’s corruption.”

But the premise is false: The emails were reviewed days before the election.

Some background:

• On July 5, 2016, former FBI Director James Comey announced that the bureau would recommend that charges not be filed in the probe into Clinton’s use of a private email system while heading the State Department.
• On Sept. 26, 2016, the FBI executed a search warrant on former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s iPhone, iPad and laptop computer, and discovered 141,000 emails on the laptop that were potentially relevant to the FBI’s closed investigation of Clinton. Longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin was married to Weiner at the time. (Abedin’s lawyer said early this year the couple was privately finalizing their divorce.) Weiner was being separately investigated for “sexting” with an underage teenage girl.
• A month later, on Oct. 28, 2016, Comey told lawmakers in a letter that the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” and that investigators would “review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information.”
  
  
• On Nov. 6, 2016, Comey told Congress in a follow-up memo that the FBI had “reviewed all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State” and that officials “have not changed our conclusions.”
• The election took place Nov. 8, 2016.

The Aug. 4 story on fbnewscycle.com ignores these facts and claims that the emails found on Weiner’s laptop weren’t eyed until after the election. The post gained popularity on the Facebook page “Donald Trump is Our President,” from which it was reshared by thousands.

“While the NYPD was conducting a forensic analysis of the Weiner/Abedin laptop, it was discovered that the hard drive contained 350,000 of Hillary Clinton’s emails and 344,000 Blackberry communications,” the story says. “Here’s what you were never told by the HRC-BHO protective media. These were never reviewed by the FBI investigators assigned to help lead agent Peter Strzok. Nor, was any attempt made to analyze the newly discovered files until after the election was over.”

As evidence, the website includes an FBI document dated Nov. 9, 2016 — the day after the election — that indicates Strzok had requested that a copy of a laptop’s hard drive be reviewed for “evidence of intrusion.” The document was among a batch released earlier this month to the conservative group Judicial Watch.

But that document isn’t evidence that the emails weren’t reviewed before the Nov. 8 election.

A June 2018 report by the Justice Department Office of the Inspector General, which conducted a review of the bureau’s investigation, indicates that the FBI obtained a search warrant for the laptop on Oct. 30, 2016 — this time to look for information related to the Clinton email investigation — and that multiple investigators were involved in the review.

“The Midyear team flagged all potentially work-related emails encountered during the review process and compared those to emails that they had previously reviewed in other datasets,” the report states, referring to the investigation by its “Midyear” code name. “Any work-related emails that were unique, meaning that they did not appear in any other dataset, were individually reviewed by the Lead Analyst, Strzok, and FBI Attorney 1 for evidentiary value.”

The report indicates the review of the emails was completed Nov. 6, 2016, before Comey sent his second letter to Congress. Still, it says, the lead analyst on the case told the inspector general’s office that even after that review, the FBI needed to do more investigative work.

“The Lead Analyst told us that the further investigative steps needed to complete the investigation included at least a ‘malware analysis’ to examine the laptop for intrusion and a re-interview of Abedin,” the report states.

The analyst said that such an analysis was needed to know if the laptop was “compromised by anyone” or if a “foreign power obtained” classified material.

So, while further examination took place after the election, it’s false to claim, as fbnewscycle.com did, that Strzok’s intrusion analysis request “shows he sat on the laptop for more than 6 weeks – until the election was over!”

The FBI’s handling of the emails on Weiner’s laptop has indeed fueled criticism about why the agency chose to wait weeks before taking action on the late-September discovery. The inspector general’s report said it found no “consistent or persuasive explanation” for the delay, but said it gathered no evidence that the laptop was “deliberately placed on the back-burner by others in the FBI to protect Clinton.”

Clinton, for her part, has argued that the timing of the announcement to review the emails did quite the opposite.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk false stories shared on the social media network.

Sources

“A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election.” Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice. June 2018.

Comey, James. Director, FBI. Letter to Congress. 28 Oct 2016.

Comey, James. Director, FBI. Letter to Congress. 6 Nov 2016.

“Statement by FBI Director James B. Comey on the Investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s Use of a Personal E-Mail System.” Press release, FBI. 5 Jul 2016.

Strzok, Peter. Agent, FBI. “Case Support Request.” 9 Nov 2016.