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