About That Anthony Weiner Laptop…
Will we ever know what was on Anthony Weiner’s laptop? Apparently not, if we are to rely on the FBI to provide us the whole truth. I mean, who among us can believe ANYTHING coming from the FBI these days – even in the Age of Trump? Director Christopher Wray appears to be more concerned about protecting the outward appearance of his agency than disclosing any Obama-era criminal conduct. And we know there is plenty of that just from the public record!
Like, for instance, that fabled Weiner laptop. To refresh your memory from what I consider to be the best authoritative account:
FBI investigators in New York were analyzing a Dell laptop, shared by Abedin and Weiner, as part of a separate sex-crimes investigation involving Weiner’s contact with an underage girl. A former Democratic congressman from New York, Weiner is serving a 21-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to sending obscene material to a 15-year-old.On Sept. 26, 2016, the lead New York agent assigned to the case found a large volume of emails – “over 300,000” – on the laptop related to Abedin and Clinton, including a large volume of messages from Clinton’s old BlackBerry account.The headers indicated that the emails on the laptop included ones sent and/or received by Abedin at her clintonemail.com account, her personal Yahoo! email account as well as a host of Clinton-associated domains including state.gov, clintonfoundation.org, presidentclinton.com and hillaryclinton.com.The agents had reason to believe that classified information resided on the laptop, since investigators had already established that emails containing classified information were transmitted through multiple email accounts used by Abedin, including her clintonemail.com and Yahoo! accounts. Moreover, the preliminary count of Clinton-related emails found on the laptop in late September 2016 — three months after Comey closed his case — dwarfed the total of some 60,000 originally reported by Clinton.FBI officials in New York assumed that the bureau’s brass would jump on the discovery, particularly since it included the missing emails from the start of Clinton’s time at State. In fact, the emails dated from the beginning of 2007 and covered the entire period of Clinton’s tenure as secretary and thereafter. The team leading the Clinton investigation, codenamed “Midyear Exam,” had never been able to find Clinton’s emails from her first two months as secretary.By Oct. 4, the Weiner case agent had finished processing the laptop, and reported that he found at least 675,000 emails potentially relevant to the Midyear case (in fact, the final count was 694,000). “Based on the number of emails, we could have every email that Huma and Hillary ever sent each other,” the agent remarked to colleagues. It appeared this was the mother lode of missing Clinton emails.
Except that the laptop was deep-sixed, for all practical purposes, as corrupt FBI Director James Comey swept the entire Hillary Clinton email investigation under the rug when he exceeded his authority by “exonerating” her just a few days before the 2016 election.
Fortunately, Judicial Watch remains on the job in forcing additional FOIA disclosures from the recalcitrant FBI. Last week, Judicial Watch announced they had received more records of Page-Strzok communications that include discussion of Weiner’s laptop and how the FBI handled the investigation. The records received show:
… a time gap of almost a month between the discovery of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails on the laptop of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner and the obtaining of a search warrant.On November 3, 2016, Strzok sends an email to Page with a “weiner timeline.” The document shows that on September 28, 2016, the Assistant Director in Charge (ADIC) of the New York Office of the FBI reported “potential MYE-related material,” referring to Midyear Exam, which was the code name of the FBI’s Clinton email investigation. The timeline shows that not until October 30, almost a month after the discovery, was a search warrant for the emails obtained.Reportedly, only 3,077 of the more than 300,000 emails found on the Weiner laptop “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.”The FBI is only processing the records at a rate of 500 pages per month and has refused to process text messages. At this rate, the production of these communications won’t be completed until late 2021.
The questions abound, don’t they?
1. Why the foot-dragging?
2. What is the content of those 675,000 emails?
3. Were any of the emails classified? If so, at what levels of classification?
4. Why was there a month delay from discovery of the laptop to issuance of a search warrant to investigate the contents of the laptop?
5. Do the laptop and the emails still exist?
6. Do they contain what NYPD personnel reportedly claimed to be shocking and salacious material implicating a lot of people? And why are the FBI and DoJ protecting them?
Watch Attorney Sidney Powell summarize what she knows about the contents of the Weiner laptop.
Drop by drop, Judicial Watch is squeezing the information out of the FBI. There is a LOT more we need to learn.
The end.
Stu Cvrk served 30 years in the US Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. An oceanographer and systems analyst through education and experience, Stu is a graduate of the US Naval Academy where he received a classical liberal education which serves as the key foundation for his political commentary. He threads daily on Twitter on a wide range of political, military, foreign policy, government, economics, and world affairs topics.
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