Here is the significance. ON Friday, news broke that the FBI was re-opening the Hillary Clinton Email caper case. The news of it sent the campaign for President in to a tizzy,
After the shock wore off – the national media went in to full damage control mode, accusing FBI director James Comey of trying to affect the election.
The Clinton Campaign demanded all the details. One by one – media outlets that praised Comey for not prosecuting Hillary Clinton in July were eviscerating him.
Now, the Clinton Campaign is getting all the details and it is ugly.
The Wall Street Journal Broke this Story.
Metadata found on the laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, a close Clinton aide, suggests there may be thousands of emails sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter. It will take weeks, at a minimum, to determine whether those messages are work-related from the time Ms. Abedin served with Mrs. Clinton at the State Department; how many are duplicates of emails already reviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and whether they include either classified information or important new evidence in the Clinton email probe.
It is well-known that there was a near-revolt in the FBI when James Comey announced to the world he was not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton over the emails.
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump is leveling the charge that Loretta Lynch, a political appointee and Attorney General of the US made a deal with Bill Clinton to get Hillary Clinton safe from Prosecution.
You could draw the conclusion that Lynch told Comey not to prosecute and Clinton offered Lynch a re-appointment as attorney general.
The WSJ Article details a concurrent FBI Investigation of the Clinton Foundation:
Early this year, four FBI field offices—New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Ark.—were collecting information about the Clinton Foundation to see if there was evidence of financial crimes or influence-peddling, according to people familiar with the matter.
Los Angeles agents had picked up information about the Clinton Foundation from an unrelated public corruption case and had issued some subpoenas for bank records related to the foundation, these people said.
So, you have a nominee from a major political party with TWO, not one FBI investigation directly related to her.
The primary issue was Clinton using a private, un-secure server to handle classified info. This first came to light after the Benghazi disaster when the embassy was attacked and Clinton refused to send help. The subsequent inquiry cause the discovery of the server – the use of which is a felony. Several people have gone to prison for breeches of security.
The new discovery occurred because the husband of Huma Abedin, disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner is being investigated by the FBI for “sexting” underage girls. They seized his laptop for evidence and found all of these emails on it that had been saved by Abedin. Abedin had made an immunity deal with the FBI, predicated on full cooperation, but this discovery means that she was not forthcoming with what she knew.
It looks like the FBI was leaking information from the ongoing investigation and Friday’s stunning turn of events was unplanned based on the extreme reactions to it. What is clear to the public is that Loretta Lynch and the FBI are at odds with each other.
In a related development, Wikileaks revealed that James McCabe, the #2 man at the FBI had his own conflict of interest:
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Mr. McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, received $467,500 in campaign funds in late 2015 from the political action committee of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime ally of the Clintons and, until he was elected governor in November 2013, a Clinton Foundation board member.
James McCabe did not disclose this conflict of interest because he had no role in that campaign. And, the leaks the WSJ got from the FBI also said the following:
The Justice Department official was “very pissed off,” according to one person close to Mr. McCabe, and pressed him to explain why the FBI was still chasing a matter the department considered dead. Others said the Justice Department was simply trying to make sure FBI agents were following longstanding policy not to make overt investigative moves that could be seen as trying to influence an election. Those rules discourage investigators from making any such moves before a primary or general election, and, at a minimum, checking with public integrity prosecutors before doing so.
“Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?” Mr. McCabe asked, according to people familiar with the conversation. After a pause, the official replied, “Of course not,” these people said.
The bottom line? It is clear that the Justice Department wanted to keep a lid on the multiple Clinton Investigations and that the FBI wanted to see the investigation through.
At a meeting early last week of senior Justice Department and FBI officials, a member of the department’s senior national-security staff asked for an update on the Weiner laptop, the people familiar with the matter said. At that point, officials realized that no one had acted to obtain a warrant, these people said.
Mr. McCabe then instructed the email investigators to talk to the Weiner investigators and see whether the laptop’s contents could be relevant to the Clinton email probe, these people said. After the investigators spoke, the agents agreed it was potentially relevant.
Mr. Comey was given an update, decided to go forward with the case and notified Congress on Friday, with explosive results. Senior Justice Department officials had warned Mr. Comey that telling Congress would violate policies against overt actions that could affect an election, and some within the FBI have been unhappy at Mr. Comey’s repeated public statements on the probe, going back to his press conference on the subject in July.
The back-and-forth reflects how the bureau is probing several matters related, directly or indirectly, to Mrs. Clinton and her inner circle.
The bottom line – this thing is going to go on for a long time. Hillary Clinton has issues. Huma Abedin? Clinton has already discarded her.
In a sick irony, Abedin had the illegally-stored emails in a file named “Life Insurance”. Let that sink in.
