Top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has told people she is unsure how her emails could have ended up on a device she viewed as her husband’s computer, the seizure of which has reignited the Clinton email investigation, according to a person familiar with the investigation and civil litigation over the matter.And this at the Daily Beast:
The person, who would not discuss the case unless granted anonymity, said Abedin was not a regular user of the computer, and even when she agreed to turn over emails to the State Department for federal records purposes, her lawyers did not search it for materials, not believing any of her messages to be there.
... the new information that the FBI found State Department-related email on her home laptop also calls into question whether Abedin in fact turned over all of the devices she used to send and receive email while working at State.So she willfully withheld any information about Anthony Weiner's laptop, right?
On June 28, 2016, Abedin said under oath in a sworn deposition that she looked for all devices that she thought contained government work on them so the records could be given to the State Department. (These records were subsequently reviewed by the FBI.)
“How did you go about searching for what records you may have in your possession to be returned to the State Department?” Attorney Ramona Cotca for Judicial Watch asked her.
“I looked for all the devices that may have any of my State Department work on it and returned -- returned -- gave them to my attorneys for them to review for all relevant documents. And gave them devices and paper,” Abedin answered.
Cotca then asked Abedin specifically what devices she gave her attorneys.
“If memory serves me correctly, it was two laptops, a BlackBerry, and some files that I found in my apartment,” Abedin said, adding the BlackBerry was associated with her Clintonemail.com account.
Not according to Michael Isikoff, writing for Yahoo News, who cites Abedin's interview with the FBI nearly three months earlier, in which, Isikoff says, the laptop was mentioned:
A Yahoo News review of Abedin’s interview with FBI agents last April -- when the Clinton email probe was in full swing -- shows that the longtime Clinton aide hinted that there might be relevant material on her husband’s personal devices. But agents do not appear to have followed up on the clues....More from Isikoff:
There is no indication from the eight-page FBI report on the interview, however, that the agents ever pressed her on what has now turned into an explosive issue in the final days of the 2016 campaign: Did Weiner have access to any classified government documents on his laptop and iPhone...?
The fact that FBI agents failed to follow up on this shows that the original probe into the Clinton email server was “not thorough” and was “fatally flawed,” said Joseph DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney and independent counsel who has been a strong critic of Comey and the FBI probe. “The first thing they should have done was gotten a sworn affidavit about all her accounts and devices,” he said, adding that agents should have immediately attempted to obtain the devices, including Weiner’s.(Joseph diGenova is not saying this in order to defend Clinton or Abedin. He's a veteran right-wing hack, and he predicted in January that Clinton would be indicted for "numerous federal crimes." By May he was predicting that Clinton wouldn't be indicted, but only because "the fix is in on any criminal case against Hillary and her aides." In September, when FBI director James Comey was regarded as a villain on the right, diGenova called on Comey to resign.)
If Isikoff is right, Abedin was as forthcoming as she should have been. The FBI dropped the ball -- and picked it up a week and a half before the election.
Since when does Comey's promise to Congress on an investigation mean he can break an existing Law, The Hatch Act. Your misguided promises are not Law. Fire him Obama.
ReplyDeleteI must be very ignorant. I know you can download e-mails, i.e. save them onto your own computer. But I never do that. Why bother? If I want to look at them, I log in to my account. I don't really know how someone could find my e-mails by examining my computer. Who are these people who store tens of thousands of e-mails on their own hardware?
ReplyDelete@paulcoppick apparently she downloaded them to print them--didn't deliberately save them.
Delete@Paul Coppock
ReplyDeleteIt depends on the account and provider. My gmail and yahoo mail accounts are stored remotely, but my cable company accounts store on my local computers.
Jesus Christ, what are they looking for? What do they expect to find in the end? "Tell Vladimir the nuclear launch code is 2318008 and 7734!" (Doesn't work so well in a courier or helvetica font)
ReplyDeleteAbedin can't have it both ways. If she "hinted" - whatever the hell that means - that there might be relevant material on the laptop. she can't be as ignorant as she now claims as to how it might have got there.
ReplyDeleteCiting Joe diGenova is on par with citing Judge Andrew Napolitano coming into sweeps week. Joe & wife Victoria Toensing are like a home cottage industry of conspiracy theory inventiveness, not even up to David Bossie group in terms of shamelessness, ignorance, and the absence of any basis in fact or turn of imagination.
ReplyDeleteWhy does anyone bother with their silly flivvers? Why would anyone go to those two weird hacks? What niche do they fill? This: each of them did something of a stint in the DoJ & has something on their resume which implies possible federal prosecution competeence & service. Neither the Bossie factory nor indeed Napolitano have any of that.
Thus we get to the nub of the problem: the DoJ is a huge institution constructed by opposing ideas & forces.
When there's a Dem president in place, we get an AG from a pool that attracted public service oriented applicants into the DoJ from top Ivy League & salt water law schools, with a special emphasis on civil rights. Result? Increased equality rights, union power, voter equality & worker rights.
When there's a Republican president in the WH, we get a RW "law & order" hack & applicants often from a lower tier law degree mills whose orientations are towards electing a permanent Republican administration, re-institutionalizing discrimination, & putting on show trials aimed at the "law & order" agenda. Result? A lot of big show trials that go right off the rails (Chicago 7, the Ellsberg prosecution, the al Hamidin mess in Oregon, and now the Malheur fiasco in Oregon) & concerted efforts to ensure higher rates of conviction by creating new courts with reduced or no civil rights at all (the military trials of the GWB era).
Because the two sets of emphasis are largely not even competing in the same arenas, there are tremendous opportunities, room & scope for empire building in the favored areas. It only appears that the same environment that produces Eric Holder & Tom Perez also produces Louis Freeh & James Comey. In fact, they've come out of entirely different foci & environments, with the result being wildly disparate speciation. The explanation is Darwinian, something the late Stephen Jay Gould could have turned into a series of long form essays or a book.
One byproduct is that the FBI houses an awful lot of twisted misfits & nitwits, and big show trial cases on so-called national security issues proliferate, encourage & tolerate overcharging that's monstrous or comic or dankly both, & bring startlingly, even embarrassingly high acquittal rates.
it also fosters an environment of blithe ignorance about communications technology in the FBI, to an extet that's notorious in the defense bar. And that's the valley in which Comey worked for years before he got into management.
I heard on the radio--ABC News, I'm almost certain--that Abedin apparently plugged her cell (Blackberry?) into the laptop at some point and inadvertently let the emails copy to the laptop, not realizing it happened. I haven't seen this information elsewhere, though.
ReplyDelete