A new book alleges FBI agents looking into former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-NY) messages to underage girls had an “oh s***” moment when they discovered thousands of Hillary Clinton’s private emails on the device.
The New York Post reported that the moment is included in a new book from journalist James B. Stewart, “Deep State: Trump, the FBI, and the Rule of Law.” From the Post:
Within hours of the Sept. 26, 2016, search warrant, FBI technicians noticed there were 340,000 emails on the laptop between Clinton and her top aide, Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin — many of them from domain addresses such as “hillaryclinton.com” and “state.gov.”
At an FBI briefing later that week, one participant said the revelation was like “dropping a bomb in the middle of the meeting.”
But the discovery fell through the cracks because top FBI officials were “overwhelmed” by the Russia probe, Stewart wrote.
A determined New York FBI agent was “scared” by what he had found and pressed his superiors to finish the job.
“I’m telling you that we have potentially ten times the volume that Director Comey said we had on the record,” the agent recounted to Stewart. “Why isn’t anybody here?”
The email revelation came the month before the 2016 election, prompting then-FBI Director James Comey (who famously held a press conference laying out all of Clinton’s crimes but saying the FBI was declining to charge her) to reopen the investigation into her private email server.
“In previous congressional testimony, I referred to the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had completed its investigation of former Secretary Clinton’s personal email server,” Comey wrote at the end of October 2016. “Due to recent developments, I am writing to supplement my previous testimony.”
“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,” Comey continued. “I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.”
As we all know, Clinton faced no penalties for conducting official State Department business on an unsecured private home server.
Comey’s reopening of the investigation into Clinton’s emails, given the timing, is credited as part of the reason Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump. It is not the only reason, however, as Clinton ignored Wisconsin despite her campaign hearing from on-the-ground activists that the state needed support. Clinton would go on to lose Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to Trump thanks to his support for manufacturing jobs.
Clinton, however, refused to admit that her policies had anything to do with her loss, as she even now maintains she won because she won the popular vote. Of course, that is not how U.S. elections are decided, as they are actually 51 smaller elections (each state plus the District of Columbia). Each of those smaller elections receives a proportional number of votes (the Electoral College) and whoever wins more of those votes wins the presidency. This is how the president has been decided for centuries and it is how Trump won, regardless of what Clinton or Democrats say.