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FBI
in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe
Laptop
may contain thousands of messages sent to or from Mrs. Clinton’s
private server
By DEVLIN BARRETT
Updated Oct. 30,
2016 7:59 p.m. ET
The surprise
disclosure that agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation are
taking a new look at Hillary Clinton’s email use lays bare, just
days before the election, tensions inside the bureau and the Justice
Department over how to investigate the Democratic presidential
nominee.
Investigators found
650,000 emails on a laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his
estranged wife Huma Abedin, a close Clinton aide, and underlying
metadata suggests thousands of those messages could have been 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
FBI; and whether they include either classified information or
important new evidence in the Clinton email probe.
Officials had to
await a court order to begin reviewing the emails—which they
received over the weekend, according to a person familiar with the
matter—because they were uncovered in an unrelated probe of Mr.
Weiner.
The new
investigative effort, disclosed by FBI Director James Comey on
Friday, shows a bureau at times in sharp internal disagreement over
matters related to the Clintons, and how to handle those matters
fairly and carefully in the middle of a national election campaign.
Even as the probe of Mrs. Clinton’s email use wound down in July,
internal disagreements within the bureau and the Justice Department
surrounding the Clintons’ family philanthropy heated up, according
to people familiar with the matter.
The latest
development began in early October when New York-based FBI officials
notified Andrew McCabe, the bureau’s second-in-command, that while
investigating Mr. Weiner for possibly sending sexually charged
messages to a teenage minor, they had recovered a laptop. Many of the
650,000 emails on the computer, they said, were from the accounts of
Ms. Abedin, according to people familiar with the matter.
Those emails
stretched back years, these people said, and were on a laptop that
hadn’t previously come up in the Clinton email probe. Ms. Abedin
said in late August that the couple were separating.
The FBI had searched
the computer while looking for child pornography, people familiar
with the matter said, but the warrant they used didn’t give them
authority to search for matters related to Mrs. Clinton’s email
arrangement at the State Department. Mr. Weiner has denied sending
explicit or indecent messages to the minor.
In their initial
review of the laptop, the metadata showed many messages, apparently
in the thousands, that were either sent to or from the private email
server at Mrs. Clinton’s home that had been the focus of so much
investigative effort for the FBI. Senior FBI officials decided to let
the Weiner investigators proceed with a closer examination of the
metadata on the computer, and report back to them.
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 the FBI 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.
New details show
that senior law-enforcement officials repeatedly voiced skepticism of
the strength of the evidence in a bureau investigation of the Clinton
Foundation, sought to condense what was at times a sprawling
cross-country effort, and, according to some people familiar with the
matter, told agents to limit their pursuit of the case. The probe of
the foundation began more than a year ago to determine whether
financial crimes or influence peddling occurred related to the
charity.
Some investigators
grew frustrated, viewing FBI leadership as uninterested in probing
the charity, these people said. Others involved disagreed sharply,
defending FBI bosses and saying Mr. McCabe in particular was caught
between an increasingly acrimonious fight for control between the
Justice Department and FBI agents pursuing the Clinton Foundation
case.
It isn’t unusual
for field agents to favor a more aggressive approach than supervisors
and prosecutors think is merited. But the internal debates about the
Clinton Foundation show the high stakes when such disagreements occur
surrounding someone who is running for president.
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.
Mr. McAuliffe had
supported Dr. McCabe in the hopes she and a handful of other
Democrats might help win a majority in the state Senate. Dr. McCabe
lost her race last November, and Democrats failed to win their
majority.
A spokesman for the
governor has said that “any insinuation that his support was tied
to anything other than his desire to elect candidates who would help
pass his agenda is ridiculous.”
Dr. McCabe told the
Journal, “Once I decided to run, my husband had no formal role in
my campaign other than to be” supportive.
In February of this
year, Mr. McCabe ascended from the No. 3 position at the FBI to the
deputy director post. When he assumed that role, officials say, he
started overseeing the probe into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private
email server for government work when she was secretary of state.
FBI officials have
said Mr. McCabe had no role in the Clinton email probe until he
became deputy director, and by then his wife’s campaign was over.
But other
Clinton-related investigations were under way within the FBI, and
they have been the subject of internal debate for months, according
to people familiar with the matter.
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.
The Washington field
office was probing financial relationships involving Mr. McAuliffe
before he became a Clinton Foundation board member, these people
said. Mr. McAuliffe has denied any wrongdoing, and his lawyer has
said the probe is focused on whether he failed to register as an
agent of a foreign entity.
Clinton Foundation
officials have long denied any wrongdoing, saying it is a well-run
charity that has done immense good.
The FBI field office
in New York had done the most work on the Clinton Foundation case and
received help from the FBI field office in Little Rock, the people
familiar with the matter said.
In February, FBI
officials made a presentation to the Justice Department, according to
these people. By all accounts, the meeting didn’t go well.
Some said that is
because the FBI didn’t present compelling evidence to justify more
aggressive pursuit of the Clinton Foundation, and that the career
anticorruption prosecutors in the room simply believed it wasn’t a
very strong case. Others said that from the start, the Justice
Department officials were stern, icy and dismissive of the case.
“That was one of
the weirdest meetings I’ve ever been to,” one participant told
others afterward, according to people familiar with the matter.
Anticorruption
prosecutors at the Justice Department told the FBI at the meeting
they wouldn’t authorize more aggressive investigative techniques,
such as subpoenas, formal witness interviews, or grand-jury activity.
But the FBI officials believed they were well within their authority
to pursue the leads and methods already under way, these people said.
About a week after
Mr. Comey’s July announcement that he was recommending against any
prosecution in the Clinton email case, the FBI sought to refocus the
Clinton Foundation probe, with Mr. McCabe deciding the FBI’s New
York office would take the lead, with assistance from Little Rock.
The Washington field
office, FBI officials decided, would focus on a separate matter
involving Mr. McAuliffe. Mr. McCabe had decided earlier in the spring
that he would continue to recuse himself from that probe, given the
governor’s contributions to his wife’s former political campaign.
Within the FBI, the
decision was viewed with skepticism by some, who felt the probe would
be stronger if the foundation and McAuliffe matters were combined.
Others, particularly Justice Department anticorruption prosecutors,
felt that both probes were weak, based largely on publicly available
information, and had found little that would merit expanded
investigative authority.
According to a
person familiar with the probes, on Aug. 12, a senior Justice
Department official called Mr. McCabe to voice his displeasure at
finding that New York FBI agents were still openly pursuing the
Clinton Foundation probe during the election season. Mr. McCabe said
agents still had the authority to pursue the issue as long as they
didn’t use overt methods requiring Justice Department approvals.
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 dormant. 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
anticorruption 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.
For Mr. McCabe’s
defenders, the exchange showed how he was stuck between an FBI office
eager to pour more resources into a case and Justice Department
prosecutors who didn’t think much of the case, one person said.
Those people said that following the call, Mr. McCabe reiterated past
instructions to FBI agents that they were to keep pursuing the work
within the authority they had.
Others further down
the FBI chain of command, however, said agents were given a much
starker instruction on the case: “Stand down.” When agents
questioned why they weren’t allowed to take more aggressive steps,
they said they were told the order had come from the deputy
director—Mr. McCabe.
Others familiar with
the matter deny Mr. McCabe or any other senior FBI official gave such
a stand-down instruction.
For agents who
already felt uneasy about FBI leadership’s handling of the Clinton
Foundation case, the moment only deepened their concerns, these
people said. For those who felt the probe hadn’t yet found
significant evidence of criminal conduct, the leadership’s approach
was the right response.
In September, agents
on the foundation case asked to see the emails contained on
nongovernment laptops that had been searched as part of the Clinton
email case, but that request was rejected by prosecutors at the
Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn. Those emails were given to
the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use
agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of
investigating possible mishandling of classified information.
Some FBI agents were
dissatisfied with that answer, and asked for permission to make a
similar request to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to
people familiar with the matter. Mr. McCabe, these people said, told
them no and added that they couldn’t “go prosecutor-shopping.”
Not long after that
discussion, FBI agents informed the bureau’s leaders about the
Weiner laptop, prompting Mr. Comey’s disclosure to Congress and
setting off the furor that promises to consume the final days of a
tumultuous campaign.
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Clinton
email inquiry: FBI gets search warrant as agency head accused of
'partisan' actions
Senate minority leader says
Comey may have broken the law
Comey charged with
withholding information about Russian email hacks
Will Clinton lose the
election because of the FBI email investigation?
Alan Yuhas and Molly
Redden
Sunday 30 October
2016 22.59 GMT
The FBI has acquired
a warrant to investigate emails found on the laptop of a former aide
to Hillary Clinton as part of its investigation into the Democratic
presidential nominee’s use of a private email server.
The move came as
senior Senate Democrats made an extraordinary attack on the head of
the FBI, James Comey, on Sunday over the new investigation, with
Senate minority leader Harry Reid warning he may have broken the law.
In a scathing
letter, Reid wrote: “Your actions in recent months have
demonstrated a disturbing double standard for the treatment of
sensitive information, with what appears to be a clear intent to aid
one political party over another.
“My office has
determined that these actions may violate the Hatch Act, which bars
FBI officials from using their official authority to influence an
election. Through your partisan action, you may have broken the law.”
The Hatch Act limits
the political activity of federal employees, for instance barring
them from seeking public office or using their authority “or
influence to interfere with or affect the result of an election”.
The former attorney
general Eric Holder joined dozens of former federal prosecutors in
signing a letter critical of Comey.
The letter obtained
Sunday by the Associated Press said Comey broke from justice
department policy when he alerted Congress to the new discovery of
emails potentially related to the Clinton email investigation.
That policy is meant
to prevent the appearance of prosecutors affecting the electoral
process.
The former
prosecutors said in the letter that Comey’s disclosure had “invited
considerable, uninformed public speculation” about the significance
of the emails.
In a brief letter to
congressional leaders on Friday, 11 days before the election, Comey
said he did not yet know whether the newly discovered emails were
pertinent or significant. The Trump campaign, trailing in national
polls, seized on the news, which the candidate himself said was
indicative of a scandal “bigger than Watergate”.
On Sunday, Reid went
on, without citing evidence, to accuse Comey of withholding
information about the FBI’s investigation into hacks on Democratic
organizations, allegedly by Russian security services, and possible
links with various former advisers to Donald Trump. In August, Reid
wrote to Comey to express concern over alleged links between Trump
associates, Russian sources and the hacks.
“There is no
danger to American interests from releasing it,” Reid said. “And
yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this
critical information.
“By contrast, as
soon as you came into possession of the slightest innuendo related to
Secretary Clinton, you rushed to publicize it in the most negative
light possible.”
Four other senior
Senate Democrats – Dianne Feinstein, Patrick Leahy, Ben Cardin and
Thomas Carper – have written to Comey since he announced the
review, demanding a full briefing on the new emails by Monday.
The emails belong to
Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide, and were found during an
investigation into Abedin’s estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, over
allegations that he sent sexual messages to an underage girl. On
Sunday, anonymous officials told the Associated Press that FBI
investigators had known for weeks that they might find pertinent
emails on his device, but that Comey was not briefed until Thursday.
On Sunday the Wall
Street Journal reported that there are about 650,000 emails to
search, including possibly thousands sent to or from Clinton’s
private server. In July, Comey announced that the FBI had found no
intentional or criminal wrongdoing in Clinton’s use of a private
server while secretary of state, although he called her practices
“extremely careless”.
Comey’s letter was
reportedly sent against the advice of top justice department
officials, including attorney general Loretta Lynch, and he admitted
in a leaked memo to FBI staff that it was a break from policy and
precedent to announce a review.
FBI directors have
historically shied from public attention. Even J Edgar Hoover, the
controversial and ambitious first head of the agency, studiously
protected his own reputation.
Comey served as
deputy attorney general under George W Bush and was appointed to head
the FBI by Barack Obama. He was a Republican for most of his career,
though he told Congress in July that he is no longer registered with
the party.
Earlier on Sunday,
top officials in Clinton and Trump’s campaigns dueled over the new
review. John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, and Clinton’s
running mate, Tim Kaine, assailed Comey for defying convention with
so few details so close to election day. Both called on Comey to
release more information about the content of the emails.
“This was an
unprecedented action,” Podesta told CNN, echoing what has become
the Clinton campaign’s official defense. “The justice department
has had a longstanding tradition of not interfering with elections.”
Podesta called
Comey’s letter “long on innuendo and short on facts”.“We’re
calling on Mr Comey to come forward and explain what’s at issue
here,” he said. “It may not even be about her server. It may not
be about her at all.” He added that Comey had “said himself, in
his letter to the hill, that these emails may not be significant”.
Trump, speaking on
Friday, gleefully responds to new FBI probe into Clinton emails
Speaking in Las
Vegas, Trump accused Clinton of bribing Lynch with the promise of
reappointment and said she “set up an illegal server for the
obvious purpose of shielding her criminal conduct from public
disclosure and exposure”.
He also joked: “We
never thought we were going to say thank you to Anthony Weiner.”
His campaign
manager, Kellyanne Conway, told CNN Comey had done the right thing by
announcing the review.
“Had he sat on the
information,” she said, “one could argue that he also would have
been interfering with the election, by not disclosing to the public
that yet again, for the second time this year, Hillary Clinton is
under FBI investigation for something of her own doing.
“She is unfit to
be president based on her constant flouting of the law.”
Trump’s running
mate, Mike Pence, echoed the businessman’s accusation of corruption
in less explicit terms and mentioned Lynch’s controversial meeting
with Bill Clinton at a Phoenix airport this summer, which Lynch
herself said “cast a shadow” over the investigation.
The effect of the
news on polling, in which according to realclearpolitics.com Clinton
leads by four points nationally, was not yet clear.
Clinton broached the
letter on Friday, calling Comey’s behavior “strange”,
“unprecedented” and “deeply troubling”. “It’s pretty
strange to put something like that out with such little information
just days before an election,” she said.
Her running mate
said on Sunday he expected Comey to reach the same conclusion –
that Clinton’s actions were not criminal – in light of these new
emails.
“This is a
distraction,” Kaine told ABC. Like Reid, Kaine suggested that Comey
had acted outside the bounds of his office, saying the letter was “in
violation of normal justice department protocol, and it involves
talking about an ongoing investigation, which also violated protocol.
“It’s just
extremely puzzling why you would break these two protocols,” he
said, “when you haven’t even seen the emails yourself.”
Reid ended his
letter with a personal rebuke of the FBI director. “Please keep in
mind that I have been a supporter of yours in the past,” he wrote,
noting that he had fought to secure Comey’s confirmation through
Republican filibusters, “because I believed you to be a principled
public servant”.
“With the deepest
regret, I now see that I was wrong.”
Donald
Trump just one point behind Hillary Clinton in latest national poll
Scott Clement, Emily
Gushkin
31-10-2016
Republicans' growing
unity behind their presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has helped
pull him just 1 percentage point behind Hillary Clinton and has
placed GOP leaders who resist him in a vulnerable position
A majority of all
likely voters say they are unmoved by the FBI's announcement Friday
that it may review additional emails from Clinton's time as secretary
of state, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News Tracking
Poll.
Just more than 6 in
10 voters say the news will make no difference in their vote, while
just more than 3 in 10 say it makes them less likely to support her;
2 percent say they are more likely to back her as a result.
The issue may do
more to reinforce preferences of voters opposed to Clinton than swing
undecided voters. Roughly two-thirds of those who say the issue makes
them less likely to support Clinton are Republicans or
Republican-leaning independents (68 percent), while 17 percent lean
Democratic and 9 percent are independents who lean toward neither
party.
When asked about
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan's decision not to campaign for Trump in
the final weeks before the election, two-thirds of Republican-leaning
likely voters disapprove of the Wisconsin Republican's move (66
percent), including nearly half who disapprove “strongly” (48
percent). Barely 1 in 5 approve of Ryan's decision (21 percent).
The Post-ABC
Tracking Poll continues to find a very tight race, with Clinton at 46
percent and Trump at 45 percent among likely voters in interviews
from Tuesday through Friday. The two major-party nominees for
president are followed by Libertarian Gary Johnson, at 4 percent, and
the Green Party's Jill Stein, at 2 percent. The result is similar to
a 47-to-45 Clinton-Trump margin in the previous wave released
Saturday, though it is smaller than what was found in other surveys
this week. When likely voters are asked to choose between Clinton and
Trump alone, Clinton stands at 49 percent, and Trump is at 46
percent, a statistically insignificant margin.
Greater Republican
unity has buoyed Trump's rising support, which has wavered throughout
the year. Trump's 87 percent support among self-identified
Republicans, ticking up from 83 percent last week, nearly matches
Clinton's 88 percent support among Democrats. Independents also have
moved sharply in Trump's direction, from favoring Clinton by eight
points one week ago to backing Trump by 19 points.
Clinton maintains
clear edge on qualifications, but not on empathy
Clinton is still
widely seen as more qualified for the presidency, leading that
measure by an 18-point margin, 54 to 36 percent. She has held a clear
advantage over Trump in qualifications throughout the campaign.
But Trump receives
more unified backing among those who see him as better qualified.
Fully 99 percent of this group supports him, compared with Clinton's
84 percent support among those who see her as better qualified. Seven
percent of this group supports Trump, while 4 percent are for Johnson
and 2 percent are for Stein.
Clinton also lost a
once-large advantage on empathy, a trait on which voters now split 46
percent for her and 43 percent for Trump when asked which candidate
understands the problems of people like them. Clinton had led Trump
by an eight-point margin on this measure in early September among
likely voters and by a 20-point margin among all adults in August.
Clinton has a narrow
eight-point edge over Trump on which candidate has stronger moral
character, 46 to 38 percent. A sizable 13 percent said that neither
candidate possesses this trait. A larger share of Trump supporters
than Clinton supporters say that neither candidate has strong moral
character (12 percent vs. 2 percent).
Republicans'
reactions to Ryan
Ryan's decision not
to campaign for Trump this fall has proved unpopular among his fellow
partisans. This comes as Ryan's status as House speaker is in peril
because of Republican infighting.
Rejection of Ryan's
stance swells to 75 percent among Republicans and GOP-leaning
independents who identify as “very conservative” compared with
smaller majorities of “somewhat conservative” Republicans (63
percent) and those who are moderate or liberal (56 percent).
Ryan's stand against
Trump is being handled differently by several other prominent
Republicans. For one, Rep. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) has said that
even though he could not endorse Trump or his actions, he still plans
to vote for the Republican nominee.
Maryland Gov. Larry
Hogan, a popular Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic state,
has spoken out against Trump, a move that was widely popular with
independents and Democrats in the state, but Republicans were split
on whether they approved of the decision.
This Washington
Post-ABC News poll was conducted by telephone Oct. 25 to 28 among a
random national sample of 1,781 adults, including landline and
cellphone respondents. Overall results have a margin-of-sampling
error of plus-or-minus-2.5 points; the error margin is
plus-or-minus-three points among the sample of 1,160 likely voters.
Sampling, data collection and tabulation are by Abt-SRBI of New York.
Copyright:
Washington Post
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