The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
FBI feared intrusions into Clinton’s emails
NEW YORK — The FBI said it needed a search warrant for thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails discovered on a computer belonging to former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner in part because agents wanted to look for evidence of “intrusions” by people trying to steal classified information, according to court documents made public Tuesday.
The search warrant application, written by an agent whose name was blacked out, was filed after FBI Director James Comey — days before the presidential election — informed Congress that investigators had discovered a new trove of email correspondence that could be pertinent to an investigation he had closed over the summer into Clinton’s use of a private server to handle emails she sent and received as secretary of state.
In it, agents wrote that thousands of emails between Clinton and one of her top aides, Huma Abedin, had been discovered on a Dell laptop used by Weiner, Abedin’s estranged husband. And, based on their previous work in the case, the agents said they had reason to suspect that those emails might contain classified material, possibly including top secret information that could cause “grave damage to national security” if disclosed.
“A complete forensic analysis and review,” the agent wrote, “will also allow the FBI to determine if there is any evidence of computer intrusions into the subject laptop, and to determine if classified information was accessed by unauthorized users or transferred to any other unauthorized systems.”
After getting court consent to delve into the newly discovered emails on Oct. 30, agents spent several days analyzing them before Comey announced that they contained no new evidence of any wrongdoing by Clinton. The surprise restart of the email probe, however, upended the presidential race, and Clinton and her supporters have blamed the investigation for her loss to Republican Donald Trump.
Representatives for Clinton criticized the FBI and Comey on Tuesday, saying they had stretched the limits of their authority.
David Kendall, Clinton’s lawyer, said the affidavit highlighted the “extraordinary impropriety” of Comey revealing that the investigation had resumed, which Kendall alleged “produced devastating but predictable damage politically and which was both legally unauthorized and factually unnecessary.”