There is an ongoing internal Justice Department probe trying to figure out why former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe put off an investigation into how then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails were found on her aide’s spouse’s laptop.
McCabe and the FBI were alerted to the issue of Clinton’s emails on former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop last fall, but McCabe did not begin in investigation into the emails until two or three weeks later, The Washington Post first reported on Tuesday.
BREAKING NEWS at The Washington Post is the story I wrote over a year ago about the FBI sitting on Comey’s request to review the Clinton emails on Weiner’s PC. It took a year, but I promised everyone this would eventually hit the mainstream—and now it has. https://t.co/U2kkPpeVuA
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) January 30, 2018
Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, forwarded State Department emails – including at least four classified emails – to her personal email account and her husband’s email account, for him to print out. The State Department recently released a batch of Abedin’s emails that had been forwarded to her now-estranged husband, Weiner. The FBI found the emails on Weiner’s laptop, and at least four of them were labeled “classified.” The emails had been forwarded toward the end of the 2016 Presidential campaign.
Abedin had also forwarded emails with intelligence information from her State Department email addresses to her private Yahoo email account back in 2009, and she did so before Yahoo was famously hacked by state-sponsored agents at least once, in 2013, and in following years, including in 2014 by a Russian spy.
The timing of the start of McCabe’s investigation is being scrutinized, as that was only a few weeks before the 2016 Presidential election. This has led some to believe the investigation was delayed in order to protect Clinton.
The FBI and a spokesman for the inspector general would not comment to The Washington Post, and McCabe’s attorney did not respond to an inquiry for comment.
McCabe just this week abruptly stepped down from his post.
He had served at the FBI for more than 20 years, since 1996. He was expected to retire this year, as he will be up for full retirement benefits mid-March.
Recently, the FBI’s top agents have come under great scrutiny, as Republican lawmakers continue to call for the release of a memo that is said to reveal an extreme bias against the Trump Administration.
The timing of McCabe’s departure is peculiar, as FBI Director Christopher Wray reportedly saw the memo a day earlier.
There is no ignoring the now-infamous memo written by House Intelligence Committee Republicans that purportedly reveals a shocking high-level conspiracy. Politicians are demanding it be released, but the FBI and the Justice Department are much more hesitant, especially in light of the recent text message incident, where thousands of messages between FBI officials apparently went missing.
The memo and text messages are said to reveal conspiracy among some of the highest echelons of government, involving the FBI plotting to spy on and upend President Donald Trump and his administration.
While Democrats are now saying the “#ReleaseTheMemo” movement is merely a distraction from the current federal investigation into Russian interference in the Presidential election, Republican politicians have been front and center pushing for the memo to be published.
Hillary Clinton has come under fire for her carless handling of classified emails on a private email server, and the topic was a huge talking point during the 2016 Presidential election.
A U.S. District Court judge in August ordered that the State Department re-open its investigation into Clinton’s emails, and to search for anything written about the Benghazi attack in 2012 that might be contained on the State Department’s email server, state.gov.
District Court Judge Amit Mehta said the State Department did not do enough when it looked for Benghazi-related emails that Clinton might have sent about the assault on the U.S. diplomatic compound. Four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, were killed during the Sept. 11, 2012, attack.
Clinton turned over about 30,000 emails to the State Department in 2014, following Freedom of Information Act requests. The requests came after officials discovered that Clinton had sent emails using her personal email account, rather than her secure government account, during her tenure as U.S. Secretary of State.
Clinton’s emails and email etiquette were a prominent talking point of the 2016 Presidential Election, when Clinton ran against and lost to Donald Trump.
