Dems’ Reid calls Comey note a partisan hit
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 Justice Department — to notify key congressional committees that he would reopen the case.
Part of the delay, The 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 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 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.
“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,” Clinton campaign manager Robby 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 his 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 had provided the FBI with all devices she used for email related to the State Department.
The latest developments shocked even Donald Trump’s camp, which blasted the bureau’s chief for not having handled the initial probe well. But one member of the 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.