Scandal refuses to die
Investigation into Clinton aide’s disgraced husband has given Donald Trump fresh ammunition
IT WAS an announcement that was supposed to provide clarity and transparency. Instead it threw the whole election campaign into chaos.
With 11 days until the United States votes to choose its next president, the letter from James Comey, the FBI director, informing Congress that more information had been found relating to Hillary Clinton’s email scandal sent the country into a frenzy.
Donald Trump could barely contain his glee – describing the saga, which began in 2009 when Mrs Clinton was appointed secretary of state, as “worse than Watergate”.
Mrs Clinton was furious, and demanded that the FBI provide more details. Mr Comey only referred to “emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation”, when he wrote to inform Congress of the fresh evidence.
Mrs Clinton and her team insisted they were in the dark. “We want to know the facts, which is why we are calling on the FBI to release all the information it has,” she said on Friday afternoon, insisting she had found out about it through the media.
The state department was said to be “stunned,” and was not given advance notice.
“We’ve heard these rumours, we don’t know what to believe,” Mrs Clinton said. “And I am sure there will be even more rumours. Even FBI director Comey admitted it might not be significant, so let’s get it out.”
Yesterday sources were providing more detail about the “pertinent” emails – which were connected to the investigation into Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of the Democratic candidate’s top aide Huma Abedin, “Oh God, Anthony Weiner,” said Joe Biden, the vice-president, with a groan yesterday, when asked about the story. “I should not comment on Anthony Weiner. I’m not a big fan. I wasn’t before he got in trouble. So I shouldn’t comment on Anthony Weiner.” In September Mr Weiner, 52, a former high-flying politician who disgraced himself with a series of sexual scandals, was alleged to have been sending explicit messages to a 15year-old girl. His wife left him, and he now faces up to 30 years in prison.
Prosecutors in Manhattan, it is believed, seized his mobile phone and iPad. They also took a laptop computer which he shared with his wife, and it is this which is believed to have sparked Mr Comey’s announcement on Friday.
Yesterday it was reported that the laptop contained tens of thousands of emails – and that, with such a significant body of fresh evidence, Mr Comey had no choice but to make the news public.
Given the spotlight under which Mrs Clinton’s email practices have been for the past two years – since the select committee investigating the deadly attack on the US consulate in Benghazi discovered her private email server – it does seem remarkable that Ms Abedin would not have turned over the laptop.
The Clinton campaign say they cannot comment until they are told what the “pertinent” emails are.
But it is thought the computer contains information showing how Mrs Clinton’s emails were managed by Ms Abedin, 40 – who has acted as Mrs Clinton’s “gatekeeper” for years, ever since starting work for the then-first lady as a 19-year-old intern.
Ms Abedin, according to Newsweek, maintained four email accounts – an unclassified state department account, another on her private server with the clintonemail.com domain, and a third on Yahoo. The fourth was linked to her husband’s account, which she used to support his activities when he was running for Congress.
Ms Abedin has said that she did not know Mrs Clinton used a private server for her emails. She told the FBI in April that she used the account on the clintonemail.com domain only for issues related to Mrs Clinton’s personal affairs, such as communicating with her friends.
For work-related records, Ms Abedin said she primarily used the email account provided to her by the state department. Crucially, Mrs Clinton never had an official state department email. Mrs Clinton, 69, has repeatedly insisted she preferred printed material to emails.
“I did not conduct most of the business I did on behalf of our country on email,” she, told a panel investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack, in which Am-
‘Oh God, Anthony Weiner. I should not comment on Anthony Weiner. I’m not a big fan. I shouldn’t comment’
bassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans died.
“I conducted it in meetings, I read massive amounts of memos, a great deal of classified information, I made a lot of secure phone calls, I was in and out of the White House all the time.”
Ms Abedin’s laptop is believed to show how Ms Abedin would move emails around from one account to another, then print them out so they could be delivered to Mrs Clinton in a diplomatic pouch by a security agent.
It is not clear whether she ever transferred official emails to the account she used for her husband’s campaign.
If the FBI determines that any of the documents that ended up on the shared device were classified, Ms Abedin could be deemed to have mishandled them. If the documents were not classified, no crime was committed.
In order to prove that was a criminal offence, however, investigators would have to establish that she had intended to disclose the contents of those classified documents, or that she knew she was mishandling that information.
And yet the damage to Mrs Clinton has been significant. Despite the FBI’s efforts to use a chisel to clarify and update the investigation, at this most sensitive time, the impact has been that of a sledgehammer.
Sean Spicer, chief strategist of the Republican National Committee, yesterday brandished a document in an interview with CNN to argue that the Clinton team could not be trusted.
The document, Form OF-109, was signed by Ms Abedin in August 2013, when she officially ended her work with the state department.
“She signed it saying she understood it was her obligation to turn over emails relating to her work,” said Mr Spicer.
“And there is this pattern; what they said they did is not true. It’s this pattern of lying and obstruction. This is what we can expect from a Clinton presidency.
“A zebra can’t change its stripes. We’ve seen it for 30 years.”
‘I did not conduct most of the business I did on behalf of our country on email. I conducted it in meetings’ ‘It’s this pattern of lying and obstruction. This is what we can expect from a Clinton presidency’