The FBI told a federal judge that it needed to search a computer to resume its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server because agents had found correspondence on the device between Clinton and top aide Huma Abedin but they did not know what was being discussed, according to newly unsealed court documents.
The bureau argued that Clinton and Abedin were previously on email chains in which classified information was discussed, and so there was probable cause to search a computer belonging to Abedin’s estranged husband, disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner, for information potentially related to the Clinton email case. That search — along with the FBI Director James Comey’s decision to tell Congress that the investigation into Clinton’s email practices had resumed — came less than two weeks before the election and upended the presidential campaign.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Kevin Nathaniel Fox approved a search warrant in the case, but the FBI is likely to draw criticism that it relied on flimsy evidence to resume its Clinton probe.
E. Randol Schoenberg, the Los Angeles lawyer who sued to have the warrant unsealed, said he saw “nothing at all in the search warrant application that would give rise to probable cause, nothing that would make anyone suspect that there was anything on the laptop beyond what the FBI had already searched and determined not to be evidence of a crime, nothing to suggest that there would be anything other than routine correspondence between Secretary Clinton and her longtime aide Huma Abedin.”
