Despite @Comey Assurances, Vast Bulk of Weiner Laptop Emails Were Never Examined | RealClearInvestigations realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/…
Whe Comey announced he was closing the Hillary email investigation for a 2nd time days before the 2016 election, he certified to Congress that his agency had “reviewed all of the communications” discovered on a personal laptop used by Huma Abedin, and her husband, Anthony Weiner
At the time, many wondered how investigators managed over the course of one week to read the “hundreds of thousands” of emails residing on the machine, which had been a focus of a sex-crimes investigation of Weiner, a former Congressman.
Comey later told Congress that “thanks to the wizardry of our technology,” the FBI was able to eliminate the vast majority of messages as “duplicates” of emails they’d previously seen.
Tireless agents, he claimed, then worked “night after night after night” to scrutinize the remaining material.
But virtually none of his account was true, a growing body of evidence reveals.
But virtually none of his account was true, a growing body of evidence reveals.
In fact, a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information.
Three FBI officials completed that work in a single 12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges.
“Most of the emails were never examined, even though they made up potentially 10 times the evidence” of what was reviewed in the original year-long case that Comey closed in July 2016, said a law enforcement official
Yet even the "extremely narrow" search that was finally conducted, after more than a month of delay, uncovered more classified material sent and/or received by Clinton through her unauthorized basement server, the official said.
Contradicting Comey’s testimony, this included highly sensitive information dealing with Israel and Hamas. The former secretary of state, however, was never confronted with the sensitive new information and it was never analyzed for damage to national security.
Even though the unique classified material was improperly stored and transmitted on an unsecured device, the FBI did not refer the matter to U.S. intel agencies to determine if nat security had been compromised, as required under a federally mandated “damage assessment” directive
One career FBI special agent involved in the case complained to NY colleagues that officials in DC tried to “bury" the new trove of evidence, which he believed contained the full archive of Clinton's emails — including the long-sought missing messages
Although the FBI’s NY office pointed headquarters to the large new volume of evidence on 9/28/16, supervising agent @PeteStrzok did not try to obtain a warrant to search the huge cache of emails until Oct. 30, 2016.
Violating department policy, he edited the warrant affidavit on his home email account, bypassing the FBI system for recording such government business. He also began drafting a second exoneration statement before conducting the search.
The search warrant was so limited in scope that it excluded more than half the emails New York agents considered relevant to the case. The cache of Clinton-Abedin communications dated back to 2007.
But the warrant to search the laptop excluded messages exchanged before or after Clinton’s 2009-2013 tenure as SOS, key early periods when Clinton initially set up her unauthorized private server and later periods when she deleted thousands of emails sought by investigators
Far from investigating and clearing Abedin and Weiner, the FBI did not interview them, according to other FBI sources who say Comey closed the case prematurely.
