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:
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.
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