Republicans insist the agency gave too much deference to the former secretary and her team.
GOP lawmakers say the decision not to demand the aides’ electronics, or even to ask for them, raises doubts about how the FBI and prosecutors handled the probe.
.. Republicans have argued for months that the FBI, federal prosecutors or both, treated witnesses in the Clinton probe with unusual deference. The GOP appears to have stepped up that argument in recent days.
.. Some news reports suggested that Abedin failed to turn the laptop over to investigators. In a statement issued by one of her lawyers Monday, Abedin insisted she didn’t know she had any emails stored on Weiner’s computer. However, it appears she was never asked to turn over any devices to anyone.
.. “Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send email on that personal domain. As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored, and decommissioned in various ways,” Comey said. “Piecing all of that back together—to gain as full an understanding as possible of the ways in which personal email was used for government work — has been a painstaking undertaking, requiring thousands of hours of effort.”
It’s also possible the FBI or prosecutors elected not to demand all the Clinton aides’ computers and other electronics because doing so might have triggered a legal battle that could have slowed the probe.
Comey, Clinton and This Steaming Mess
Were the emails in question sent to or from Clinton? Comey didn’t and perhaps couldn’t say. What about them warranted inspection? Again, he had nothing to offer.
He told F.B.I. employees in a memo that he was hoping, with his announcement, not “to create a misleading impression” of some hugely significant discovery. But that’s exactly and predictably what he did.
.. Even as Trump was praising Comey and saying that the election might not be quite as rigged as he’d feared, Limbaugh was telling his listeners that Comey was “just doing this to take everybody’s attention off of the WikiLeaks email dump” that was embarrassing Clinton and her aides.
10 Questions (and Answers) About New Email Trove
What’s the worst-case scenario for Mrs. Clinton and her aides?
In July, Mr. Comey announced that the bureau had not found enough evidence to charge anyone with a crime for the mishandling of classified materials on Mrs. Clinton’s server. If the new emails indicate intentional efforts by her or her aides to move such information outside secure government systems, or if they tried to impede the earlier inquiry, the F.B.I. will most likely want to investigate further. But the bureau has just begun the process of combing through the new emails, and officials believe that at least some are duplicates of messages that have already been examined.
James Comey Broke with Loretta Lynch and Justice Department Tradition
“You don’t do this,” one former senior Justice Department official exclaimed. “It’s aberrational. It violates decades of practice.” The reason, according to the former official, who asked not to be identified because of ongoing cases involving the department, “is because it impugns the integrity and reputation of the candidate, even though there’s no finding by a court, or in this instance even an indictment.”
.. The F.B.I. director is an employee of the Justice Department, and is covered by its policies. But when asked whether Comey had followed these guidelines and consulted with the Public Integrity Section, or with any other department officials, Kevin Lewis, a deputy director of public affairs for the Justice Department, said, “We have no comment on the matter.”
.. According to the Administration official, Lynch asked Comey to follow Justice Department policies, but he said that he was obliged to break with them because he had promised to inform members of Congress if there were further developments in the case. He also felt that the impending election created a compelling need to inform the public, despite the tradition of acting with added discretion around elections.
.. “Comey is an outstanding law-enforcement officer,” Miller said, “but he mistakenly thinks that the rules don’t apply to him. But there are a host of reasons for these rules.”
.. As Miller sees it, Comey’s “original sin” was the press conference he held in July regarding the Clinton e-mail investigation.
.. Ordinarily, when no charges are brought, such matters are not exposed to public view, let alone addressed at press conferences.
.. But, as Miller notes, Comey’s press conference triggered a series of other events, including congressional hearings where Comey was forced to defend his decision not to recommend prosecution. Comey’s letter to Congress on Friday updated his earlier statements that the Clinton e-mail investigation had ended.
.. “Of course, we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. At the same time, however, given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression. In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter and in the middle of an election season,” he noted, “there is significant risk of being misunderstood.”
.. This official thought that Comey “didn’t want to look tainted. This new information comes to him, and he’s afraid if he doesn’t make it public until after the election he’ll be impeached. People will say he lied to Congress. But in the end he did the self-protective thing. Was it the right thing? Put it this way: it isn’t what previous Administrations have done.”