Despite Comey Assurances, Vast Bulk of Weiner Laptop Emails Were Never Examined.
By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigations
August 23, 2018
When then-FBI Director James Comey announced he was closing the hildebeest email investigation for a second time just 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 hildebeest’s closest aide, 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....
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 hildebeest of criminal charges....
If the FBI “soft-pedaled” the original investigation of hildebeest’s emails, as some critics have said, it out-and-out suppressed the follow-up probe related to the laptop, sources for this article said....
Republicans are clamoring for a special counsel to reopen the hildebeest email case, though a five-year statute of limitations may be an issue concerning crimes relating to her potential mishandling of classified information.
However, conducting a broader and more thorough search of the Weiner laptop may still have prosecutorial justification. Other questions linger, including whether subpoenaed evidence was destroyed or false statements were made to congressional and FBI investigators from 2014 to 2016, a time frame that is within the statute of limitations. The laptop was not searched for evidence pertaining to such crimes. Investigators instead focused their search, limited as it was, on classified information.
Also, the FBI is still actively investigating the hildebeest Foundation for alleged foreign-tied corruption. That probe, handled chiefly out of New York, may benefit from evidence on the laptop.
(RealClearInvestigations)