Man oh man, talk about not cleaning out your mail box. The computer shared by Huma Abedin and her soon to be ex-husband Anthony Wiener had around 650,000 emails on it’s hard drive according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, which is why it will take a long time to sift through the documents.
While the emails haven’t been read as if yet, a search of the “metadata” turned up thousands of hits to state.gov addresses, and those of her private email server.
So while the Democrats are demanding that the FBI release all the emails ASAP, It will take weeks, at a minimum, to determine whether those messages are work-related from the time Ms. Abedin served with Mrs. Clinton at the State Department; how many are duplicates of emails already reviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and whether they include either classified information or important new evidence in the Clinton email probe.
At the time however, the FBI had permission to search the computer for emails related to Weiner’s sexting and child pornography, but not the Hillary email case so they had to wait for a court order to begin looking at the Hillary related emails.
In their initial review of the laptop, the metadata showed many messages, apparently in the thousands, that were either sent to or from the private email server at Mrs. Clinton’s home that had been the focus of so much investigative effort for the FBI. Senior FBI officials decided to let the Weiner investigators proceed with a closer examination of the metadata on the computer, and report back to them.
At a meeting early last week of senior Justice Department and FBI officials, a member of the department’s senior national-security staff asked for an update on the Weiner laptop, the people familiar with the matter said. At that point, officials realized that no one had acted to obtain a warrant, these people said.
Mr. McCabe then instructed the email investigators to talk to the Weiner investigators and see whether the laptop’s contents could be relevant to the Clinton email probe, these people said. After the investigators spoke, the agents agreed it was potentially relevant.
Not all the 650K emails are relevant but agents believe tens of thousands of them are relevant. So many were relevant that Comey could not help but reopen the investigation.
McCabe is the agent whose wife was given over $675K in campaign donations by Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime member of team Clinton. The move didn’t break any laws, it just lack demonstrated the lack of sensitivity to the very appearance of being ethical in the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
On Thursday, Comey was given an update, decided to go forward with the case and notified Congress on Friday, with explosive results.
