Report: Despite Comey Claims, FBI Never Examined Vast Bulk Of Weiner Laptop Emails
Peter Strzok “hand-picked” the 3,000 of 700,000 emails the FBI examined
Real Clear Politics (RCP) is reporting that the vast bulk of Hillary-related emails found on disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop were not examined by the FBI. This is in direct contradiction to former FBI chief James Comey’s testimony to Congress.
According to RCP, the FBI read only 3,000 of over 700,ooo of the emails found on Weiner’s laptop, and these 3,000 emails were “hand-picked” by disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok.
Convicted sex offender Weiner is the (perhaps former?) husband of Hillary Clinton top aide Huma Abedin, and the FBI, while investigating Weiner’s sex crimes, found thousands of emails the FBI believed to be related to the Hillary email scandal.
We’ve been covering the Weiner laptop scandal; here are a few relevant posts:
- Reports: Weiner-Abedin computer may have thousands of pertinent emails
- Comey: Huma sent classified emails to Weiner, but no prosecution because lacking criminal intent
- Judicial Watch: Classified emails on Weiner laptop show need to reopen Hillary server investigation
Regarding the new revelation that the vast bulk of Weiner laptop emails were never read by the FBI, Paul Sperry writing for Real Clear Investigations reports:
When then-FBI Director James Comey announced he was closing the Hillary Clinton 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 Clinton’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 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 with direct knowledge of the investigation.
Powerline reports additional contents of the report highlighted an RCP email summary:
With a little help from the RCP email summary noting the piece this morning, I should add that Sperry also reveals:
• After claiming they could not possibly review the 675,000 potentially relevant emails in the two weeks before the Nov. 8 election, FBI officials suddenly claimed they had made a great technological breakthrough that allowed them to eliminate the vast majority of emails as duplicates. But that technology didn’t work.
• The highly restrictive warrant issued to search the Weiner laptop‘s contents prevented investigators from capturing any “smoking-gun” emails outside the time frame of Clinton’s official tenure as Secretary of State, ones that might show intent to evade security requirements in setting up her private server, or efforts to cover up culpability afterward.
• Ultimately, the FBI manually reviewed only about one percent of the emails – a total of 6,827. FBI lawyers deemed more than half of these personal or outside the scope of the investigation, so that ultimately, only 3,077 emails were reviewed for potential classified material. This review was performed by three agents in one 12-hour session.
• Attorney General Loretta Lynch tried to limit public leaks about the existence of the emails. Once their existence was exposed, she pushed the FBI to review them as quickly as possible.
• As he was leading the review of these emails, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, whose anti-Trump bias contributed to his recent firing, exchanged a series of text messages about the Weiner laptop with another opponent of Trump, FBI lawyer Lisa Page. He assured her, “We’re going to make sure the right thing is done,” and, “It’s gonna be ok.”
• The FBI was drafting a statement about the emails before it had reviewed them.
• The FBI did not interview either Weiner or Huma Abedine [sic] before closing the case again.
• The FBI did not refer the Weiner laptop matter to the intelligence agencies to determine if national security were compromised, as required under a federally mandated “damage assessment” directive.
• The emails that were searched revealed new material, classified and unclassified, not seen by the FBI in its prior investigation of Clinton. At least five new classified emails were on the laptop, including highly sensitive information dealing with close Israel and the terrorist group Hamas.
Given this report that only a tiny portion of the Weiner laptop emails were examined, that those examined were selected by Strzok, and that Comey appears to have lied about this fact to Congress, Senator Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) contention that Comey wrote the infamous Hillary exoneration letter before the official investigation concluded has new meaning and possibly new implications.
Watch Jason Chaffetz interview Sperry on this bombshell report:
Partial transcript via The Daily Caller:
“James Comey told Congress that they had reviewed all of the Clinton emails, hundreds of thousands, that were found on the Weiner laptop. But that was not true. They barely looked at any of them. Just 3,000 of 700,000,” Sperry began during his appearance on Fox News’s “Ingraham Angle.”
Jason Chaffetz, who was filling in for Laura Ingraham, interrupted, “Wait, wait, wait. They looked at how many?”
“3,000 out of potentially relevant 700,000 emails were actually individually examined for classified information and incriminating evidence,” Sperry continued. “Peter Strzok, the disgraced agent who was in charge of this midyear investigation into the Clinton emails, he actually personally handpicked the 3,000 sample. And with two other investigators, they went through them all supposedly, pulled an all-nighter, ordered pizza, and said nothing new here. Case closed once again.”
Sperry’s investigative piece specified, saying that 3,077 emails were “directly reviewed.”
“I’ve got to tell you, as the former chairman of the committee, as a former member of Congress, I mean, how can that be anything other than the director of the FBI lying to Congress and misleading us?” Chaffetz asked.
Sperry concluded, “Well he also swore under oath, that, he had this story that there was this miraculous breakthrough in technology that allowed the FBI to process the Weiner laptop for evidence rapidly. Turns out that doesn’t pass the smell test. That didn’t check out either. Turns out there was a technical glitch that thwarted that effort.”
Perhaps this would be a good time for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to demonstrate his DOJ’s purported apolitical approach and reopen the Hillary email investigation. There is, after all, strong evidence of wrong-doing in this particular instance.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1032934937962442754
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Comments
Where is the laptop? Where are copies of the content of the laptop?
Extremely good questions. I suspect the laptop is totally gone, as in nobody knows where it is gee I wonder who was supposed to keep track of that but now it’s gone and nobody is to blame so what?
The *contents* of the laptop are another thing. Law enforcement takes a ‘snapshot’ of the laptop hard drive for evidence purposes, which includes filled *and* unfilled sectors of the drive so deleted files can be undeleted, etc… This snapshot is legally able to be entered as evidence, checksummed and signed as to the date, time, and place of extraction. It is frozen, in effect, and any extraction of data does not affect the image.
This would have been done in the domain of (I think) SDNY Feds, which was why Comey had the laptop dragged to DC for examination so it could be ‘looked’ at, dismissed, and subsequently ‘lost.’ If the SDNY kept the image in its files, that could be used to extract out all of the desired emails regardless of the laptop’s loss.
Extremely good answers. I so hope that the contents still exist somewhere: I have to retain a glimmer of hope that at least an ember of the rule of law still exists in this Great Country. If the standards of ethics and respect for justice have sunk to the level of wanton destruction of obvious, material evidence, without compunction or fear, by our highest levels of law enforcement, we have a grave situation before us.
Yes, we have a grave situation before us.
All of the investigation of the drive(s) will happen on the copy. My guess is the original was imaged upon arrival at the forensic lab. It will then be Imaged again at the next forensic lab it is shipped to. So there are possibly many copies of the original.
Following the grand tradition of the IRS scandal, the backup of the files was probably deleted. Although, it may have been smashed like all those cellphones.
Dang, so many accidents just seem to happen to evidence the DemonRats don’t like…
No comments 45 minutes after this nice write-up.
We have become desensitized to this outrageous fact pattern.
45 should have been 40.
Grotesque malfeasance in high places doesn’t increase my typing speed.
I had to digest this information first. Then I had to quit crying. Then I had to quit screaming. Now I’m trying to breathe because the utter contempt I’m feeling toward D.C. is overwhelming me.
This country is finished. We have failed because we’re too damn stupid to fight back.
And, to think that the election of one man, even a President, has been the impetus for all these revelations. Or, think how much we would have never known, most likely, had that woman been elected.
That’s the part that’s making me crazy. I keep thinking about that very fact.
“That’s the part that’s making me crazy.”
Stop it! That’s the name of a skit by Bob Newhart. If you get a laugh, good. If not, well, perhaps you can say my intention was well intended. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow0lr63y4Mw
Bahaha! Thank you, I needed that!
“Bahaha! Thank you, I needed that!”
You’re welcome and glad you enjoyed the skit. I think I heard, as some time, that if we lose our sense of humor we also lose our perspective of things. With the days ahead until the mid-term elections, I we’ll need to laugh a bit more of the foolish of the human being and the fixes we seem to get ourselves into.
Woman? Zombie or android by the time she was running/stumbling for office
After reading the post, I figured it was more important to clean and oil guns (guns that I no longer own of course).
I saw this either Thursday or late Wednesday night on Reddit. Ace broke out the Flaming Skull on it Thursday. He has over 800 comments
http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=376713
Sundance posted yesterday. 200 comments
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/08/23/real-clear-investigations-james-comey-lied-weiner-laptop-emails-never-reviewed/
This is clarification of what we suspected, that the FIB lied. I don’t see comments as being indicative of how important an article is. Controversial articles get lots of comments. Things we didn’t know for sure, but knew logically, won’t get as many comments.
Thank you, Fuzzy Slippers, for your article
Did you ever play the older style pinball machines? Sometimes a person could shoot a pinball and it would get into something like a pinball twilight zone, repeatedly bouncing from one bumper to another to another to another. It did so to the point one wondered if the opportunity to use the flippers was ever going to come.
Well, this is the way my brain feels with the state of current affairs in our country. They’re so bouncing around in the little brain of mine I’m hardly able to keep track of them let alone the cast of characters.
Nobody should be bewildered. The way to fix the country starts with one very simple step: replace AG Sessionszzz with someone who will aggressively prosecute the criminals in D.C.
That one action would cause a sea change.
The AG’s office is the linchpin for all corruption. That’s why it keeps being filled with cronies and Deep State agents.
With Sessions out, there could be some positives. However, there are many, many more problems that such a change wouldn’t impact. Uncertain times.
Where is Waldo? …I mean Wray?
Quite a racket.
Start with the theory that Hillary was using her entirely unsecured private server to
leaksell classified and other sensitive material to interested foreign parties. They arrange by e-mail (later deleted) to make a suitable donation to the Clinton Global Slush Fund, and Hillary e-mails the requested material to her account on her own server. She can’t e-mail the customer the documents directly, because the fact that she’s e-mailing something to the Russians or the Chinese or the Cubans or the Iranians will show up in the metadata logs, and she doesn’t control those or their backups. So she sanitizes the process, breaking the trail by using her own leaky server. The customer’s intelligence agencies hack into that sever and retrieve the desired material. One customer could account for thousands of e-mails . . . enough to add up to 30,000 soon enough, without imagining that it was all about yoga schedules and Chelsea’s baby shower. Result—customer gets what he wants, Hillary gets bags of money, the treason is never detected because she can delete the e-mails and their SECRET attachments, and none of this will ever be found in the backups because there aren’t any. Pretty slick.Now, for the obvious extension of the scheme—what to do for customers who don’t have such sharp computer intelligence people, and are unable to hack into the server to retrieve the SECRET stuff they’ve paid for? Hillary will have to e-mail it. But not directly. Load it onto a laptop (illegally, of course), have Huma take the laptop home, then e-mail the stuff to the customer from, I don’t know, a public library. The library’s system will retain the metadata showing who sent and received the e-mails, but nobody will think to look at that, because it’s not from Huma’s home computer, and not from a government office.
Very slick indeed. The weak point? Huma got caught with the goods. But not to worry, the FBI is on the job. They’ll be careful to find nothing, like the good Swamp pros they are.
While this is not completely impossible, it’s pure speculation, unsupported by even a shred of foundation. The evidence is bad enough; don’t run ahead of it.
For an altogether more likely scenario see Mac45’s comment below.
This story is huge and has gotten zero traction, outside of a few conservative sites like this one.
Unless this two-tiered justice BS changes, our country is doomed.
“Unless this two-tiered justice BS changes, our country is doomed.”
Just like the Alamo, Colonel Travis.
The Sunday morning talk shows will be all over this, right?…right?
Like Chuck Todd says, “nobody is above the law.”
What Chuck really means is that only his fellow travelers are above the law
I said it when it happened – this was an arrogant, in-your-face lie.
It was the kind of lie you tell when you don’t even care enough to come up with a plausible lie.
There were 600,000 emails on the laptop. Clinton had only turned over 30,000.
For their so-called ‘wizardry’ to WORK, would require you to believe that for some reason Abedin had TWENTY COPIES of every single email on her computer.
Of course it was bullshit. I said it at the time. Anybody that believed they checked even a tiny fraction of them is an idiot or a partisan hack.
I think the only ones who bought the lie were the leftists who believed Obama and his Unicorn Farting Rainbows.
At what point does things get bad enough to wake up Sessions to do his job? Trump made the points of how the DOJ is so one sided, despite the Sessions rhetoric about being non-political and honoring the law. Tons of laws were broken, yet the agencies were used to help a candidate win an election. That is serious… yet Sessions does nada.
This is why I’ve been saying for a while that Sessionszzz is part of the conspiracy. The only other explanation is that he’s completely incompetent, which isn’t any better.
Whether he’s corrupt or incompetent doesn’t matter. Sessionszzz must go.
“That’s the part that’s making me crazy.”
Stop it! That’s the name of a skit by Bob Newhart. If you get a laugh, good. If not, well, perhaps you can say my intention was well intended. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow0lr63y4Mw
This was supposed to be a reply to JoAnne.
I saw it!
Reading from the same FBI data dump , <a href="https://www.factcheck.org/2018/08/clintons-emails-weiners-laptop-and-a-falsehood/FactCheck.Org gets another interpretation of what the dumped data shows.
This seems to be about something completely different.
Not to mention it comes from the completely devoid of facts Fact Check organization.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Once again, we learn that James Comey is a liar. Once again, we learn that the FBI investigators did not do “due diligence” on examining evidence. Now, maybe if Trump conversations were on the laptop then that might have changed their diligence.
There are two tiers of justice at the Federal level. One for insiders and one for outsiders. It is time that Justice quit peeking at the perpetrator.
“Once again, we learn that the FBI investigators did not do “due diligence” on examining evidence”
No, they were very diligent. Strzok hand picked 3000 emails that didn’t have anything incriminating on Hillary, showed them to the rest of the team, and ignored (and I would bet personally destroyed) the remaining emails. It’s never explained how those, and only those, emails were unique and the other tens of thousands of emails were duplicates, and the other members of Strzok’s team apparently didn’t understand that’s almost certainly bald-faced lie, or didn’t care.
And they still found 7 e-mails with information classified Secret or higher.
It is long past time for Comey to go to prison.
We all know now that Mueller’s appointment was arranged by Comey. He told Rosenstein it was to be Mueller. The whole thing stinks.
Hah! Sessions won’t do a thing.
So when it’s lifelong apolitical investigative journalists reporting from a half-dozen independent confidential sources, it’s “fake news”, but when a self-described conservative commentator writes an article citing one confidential source, it’s “substantial evidence”. Interesting.
That’s a good one. Thanks, I needed a good laugh. Relieved a lot of tension.
Here is the most likely deal with the Abedin copies of HRC’s emails. They were insurance and HRC either did not know that they existed, or assumed that a laptop in Anthony Weiner’s possession would not be scrutinized. Otherwise, that laptop, and possibly Weiner and Abedin would have disappeared.
Try this scenario. HRC wants to segregate her personal emails from the government emails, in order to keep their contents secret. The why of that we will not go into at this time. So, she has a private server set up which she uses to handle ALL of her emails, which are going outside State. She uses this server to communicate with several trusted collaborators, including Abedin. It is decided that Abedin would periodically copy emails stored on the server to a laptop, which is in the custody of her husband, Anthony “Carlos Danger” Weiner, in NYC. This is a pretty safe way to back-up the emails. Except, Carlos falls back into his old habits and gets caught sexting with a 15 year old and has his electronic devices seized, including the laptop with the emails. Now, a problem exists. The laptop is in the custody of the FBI in the SDNY, as evidence, and part of its contents are known to the NYPD. Allowing HRC’s attorneys scrub the emails, before turning them over to the FBI, can not be done, as the laptop is evidence in another criminal case. So, it sits “ignored”, until Comey is forced to deal with it before the election.
When it became necessary to “admit” that the “lost” laptop existed, not only was there no time to vet all of the nearly 3/4 of a million messages on the device, the FBI did not want to know what was on them. There was likely going to be some that were classified and probably some that were evidence of other criminal behavior by HRC. Once elected, HRC would be safe from any potential criminal action. And it was evident that the upper echelons of the federal government had already decided that HRC WOULD be elected. Once she was not elected, then the FBI had to take some steps that they could present as “evidence’ that they had been done their job, whether such step were actually taken or not.
The the actions supposedly taken by the FBI, with regard to the laptop, are simply more lies designed. to protect HRC and the upper echelons of the FBI and DOJ. If Trump was elected there was a very good chance that many people in the Obama Administrations would end up wearing orange.
This is a pretty safe way to back-up the emails.
The whole rationale for Hillary’s private server is that there would be no backups anywhere (unless she wanted them, which she wouldn’t). She wanted to be able to erase the evidence, and then sterilize the drive (or wipe it with a cloth, or something), leaving no trail anywhere. Backups would blow that whole scheme.
Close. The purpose of Hillary’s server was that all of the data would be under her complete control, something that she would not have been able to do if she had used the State Dept. server, and that she was too lazy to do by simply splitting accounts: One for State.Gov and one for Bribes.
The emails on the laptop were (as far as I understand) accidentally put there when Hillary (or Huma using her login) logged into her server on said laptop, and Microsoft Outlook happily proceeded to ‘sync’ the local and the remote mail file, thus leaving a cache file under Hillary’s login and Huma’s login each.
Even better, Microsoft .PST files do not actually delete emails inside them when you push the button, but only mark the space as available for later use, so law enforcement can ‘undelete’ a huge number of deleted emails with a single simple click.
(darned submit/preview button confusion)
In addition, a big pat on the back to SDNY who managed to grab the laptop before it was wiped. Many laptops now have bios-based disk sanitizing programs that will take under an hour using a DOD 3-cycle random number writing technique to clean a laptop down to the bare metal. And once that’s done, nobody’s getting data off it.
No “pat on the back” is due to the USAO SDNY or the Bureau. The Bureau in NYC had no choice as to seizure of the laptop, it was used to commit a criminal act which they were investigating.
You are correct that the purpose of the private email server was to give HRC total control over her emails. Using the State server would have opened the door to FOIA requests and other inspections and a commercial account would not guarantee that her emails were not being copied [they usually are] or intercepted.
It is possible that the email and Blackberry communications were copied accidentally if Outlook was being used [as it may well have been, considering HRC’s computer naivete]. How the transfer was accomplished is simply an area of speculation. But, it is entirely possible that HRC, or Abedin, wanted insurance, in the form of copied emails. It is possible that these communications were intentionally copied, in order to have them available but inaccessible to the government.
The problem with things like this is the fact that the players are all computer novices. They do not understand how the computer or its programs work. Most people leave all of their info and communications, unencrypted, right on the hard drive. If they use removable storage media, it is often usb connected storage devices without significant encryption. Then they are surprised when someone else produces these emails.
Sessions is in on the scam.
What a rat he turned out to be: the old boys club before country.
Me thinks someone has pictures of him with young boys, or something because he is being quite obedient
In Sperry’s article he makes reference to AG Lynch pushing the FBI to finish it’s investigation into the e-mails. Imagine that, an AG pushing the FBI. How quaint. Way too hands on for Jeffery Beauregard Sessions though.
1) Wait for the November elections
2) Fire and replace Sessionszzz
3) Reopen the sham investigations of Hillary
4) Start prosecuting the rest of the swamp
5) Winning
Too little, too late. The psychic damage is already done.
Even if klinton isnt dead by then, it’ll be anti climatic.
Yes, the swamp’s best card was sessions. What scum he turned out to be.
The purpose isn’t to get Hillary (you’re right: punishment at the very end of a long criminal career isn’t really justice). The purpose is to restore the rule of law, mainly by the other prosecutions.
The swamp needs to know that they’ll be held accountable.
It’s quite telling the differences between how the two camps are being dealt with.
Mueller has complete and utter free reign to do as he pleases to anyone who committed the crime of supporting Trump.
Clintons cronies on the other hand, the ones who have actually committed REAL crimes, are free to do as they please safe in the knowledge no one will cone after them….BUT…only as long as the mid terms go as planned.
And therein lies the problem for the democrats. If they get fucked over in the mid terms they are toast!
Sessionzzzzzz gets fired. Mueller gets fired and a fuck load of people will start being looked at very VEEEEERY, closely and funnily enough they will all be Democrats.
Pay backs a bitch but in the case payback us very much needed to restore law and order!!
Why wait for the mid-terms?
Because Vichy and Grassley are blocking confirmation of replacements.
https://www.politicususa.com/2018/05/31/heres-why-trump-cant-fire-sessions-rosenstein-or-mueller.html
Given revelations such as this one, the extraordinary number of very senior FBI/DOJ personnel who have either quite or have been fired, given the abundant information showing how the Russia dossier was a fabrication, given the absence of any real criminal acts (on Trump’s part that is) discovered by the Mueller investigation and the investigation preceding it, and given how it is now clear how the Russians had zero effect on the election, one has to wonder why the Mueller investigation continues. It was conceived in fraud by dishonest people and has been perpetuated by lies and deceit so why is it so terribly important that it continue?
>
Likewise, given the abundant information that all points towards illegal behavior by the FBI/DOJ in support of Hillary Clinton and the abundant data suggesting illegal behavior being conducted by Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and so many others, why have we seen or heard nothing? Our legal system and government is very broken.
Sorry about the bad link in my earlier post. Here is the correct link where you can follow FactCheck’s sources which appear to cite the same FBI data dump and the Justice IG’s Midyear analysis report:
https://www.factcheck.org/2018/08/clintons-emails-weiners-laptop-and-a-falsehood/
Real Clear Investigations and all Trumpers posting here begin with the assumption that James Comey and Pete Strzok are lying but multiple hearings by Congress have not provided a single piece of convincing evidence to prove this distorted view.
Somehow you folks continue to believe that the Trump criminal organization is more important than the constitution and the rule of law – despite the crumbling facade of Trumpism.
Just my warped imagination, I’m sure, but Comey did testify under oath that FBI reviewed all the laptop emails when in fact the FBI did no such thing. For a Trumpster, that would be perjury, lying to the FBI and defrauding the Gov’t
One of the great misnomers in history: factcheck.org
Rule of law! Ha Ha Hee Hee.
Again, this doesn’t seem to be about the same thing at all. FactCheck may be completely correct, for all I know, but it doesn’t seem to contradict anything cited in this post.
I have been watching politics for 60 yrs;
NOTHING will come of this. They have too
much invested in it to reveal the truth.
The level of corruption boggles the mind.
Republicans hold the reins of power. How bad would it be if Dems were majority and Pres.?
Who is this Jeff Sessions everyone talks about?
Comey lied?
Why, that’s not possible is it?
They’re all lying, Mueller’s cabal, and damn near 100% of the FBI and DOJ leadership.
And I’m not very enthused by the “honesty” of the lower level either.
Comey lied when he said that Clinton didn’t mishandle classified information. She set up an vulnerable email server to handle all of her work emails. Her staff and others used this email system to send her information that she needed to do her job. A large number of these emails contained classified info which she read. This means that she knew that there was classified info on her email server. That is all that is required for her to be convicted of espionage.
An important thing that is missing is that we don’t know who transferred classified info to Hillary’s email server via email. We should be able to determine this for the most part be examination of the records of access to the classified info found on Hillary’s server on the classified system. So take the classified info about NK nuclear weapons development found in Hillary’s email. Find out who of her staff accessed that info on the classified servers and that person is likely to be responsible for transferring the classified info from the classified server to Hillary’s server which is a crime.
“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.”
The “technical glitch” apparently involved missing metadata. The assumption seemed to be that the missing metadata was in the Weiner/Abedelin emails. Nope. The missing metadata was almost assuredly from the original trove of emails received by the FBI from Crooked Hillary’s attorneys. The emails submitted had been printed out and submitted on paper, which means that they were accepted without much of their normal email headers. Standard conforming email headers are required for any email sent across the Internet (with some minor exceptions). According to RFC 5322 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322), email headers are comprised of ASCII text, with one field per line, a field name followed by field values. The most well known of these fields are the To, From, CC, and Subject fields, that are invariably displayed, and were almost assuredly provided on the printed emails received by the FBI. Most header fields though are not normally displayed or printed, and of particular interest here are the three fields that utilize “msg-id” parameters, which are strings that are guaranteed to be globally unique for each new email. The “message-id” field specifies the unique id for this email, and can be used to easily deduplicate (Strzok called it “dedupping”) emails. The “in-reply-to” and “references” fields can be used to thread email conversations. This was, very likely, the “technical glitch”, that the original Clinton emails used to deduplicate the new emails were missing these critical email header fields because they had been received in printed, and not electronic format. Absent those email header fields, the dedupping becomes very difficult to do quickly or accurately.
My experience is that emails provided during discovery are almost always required to be in electronic form. I thought at the time that it was odd that the FBI (Strzok) had accepted them in paper format instead. Just too vulnerable to manipulation and too hard to match. Why though did the Strzok and the FBI do that? The easy answer is that it was the same pro-Clinton/anti-Trump team doing their best to elect their preferred candidate. But I think the better answer is that AG Lynch essentially refused to provide the FBI with prosecutor resources in their Clinton email non-investigation. They had to do something, since they had criminal referrals from Congress, but couldn’t do a real investigation because they didn’t have any prosecutor resources available. That meant no grand jury, and no search warrants. All that the FBI had was whatever Clinton and her attorneys voluntarily gave them.
Session’s is the FBI mole in the Trump campaign!