WASHINGTON: The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) obtained a necessary warrant to look into thousands of emails, they found in connection to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
The computer, reportedly used by Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin, contains around 650,000 emails. The investigators would probe if any of those emails breached the national security protocols.
Meanwhile, US Senator Harry Reid said FBI Director James B Comey might have violated a federal law that barred federal officials from using their authority to influence an election.
The Americans are voting on November 8 to elect their 45th president. Last week, the FBI director shocked the Democrats after he sent a letter to the Congress saying the FBI would reopen investigation against Clinton on the basis of some new evidence it had found.
The campaign managers of Democratic candidate, Hilary Clinton, said that timing of the letter was akin to influencing the elections. The Republican candidate, Donald Trump, seized the opportunity and hurled more accusations at his Democratic rival.
“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,” Senator Reid wrote to the FBI director.
“I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these actions may violate the Hatch Act, which bars the FBI officials from using their official authority to influence an election. Through your partisan actions, you may have broken the law.”
Senator Reid made an extremely bold claim about the Trump campaign and the Russian government. “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government – a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States – which Trump praises at every opportunity.”
The senator said the American people have a right to know that information. “I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public. There is no danger to American interests from releasing it. And yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information,” he said lambasting the FBI director.
The FBI agents investigating Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state knew early this month that messages recovered in a separate probe might be relevant to their case. However, they waited weeks before briefing the FBI director.
The FBI director just took one day to inform the Congress about the matter arguing he was under obligation to inform the lawmakers about that. By doing so he ignored the Justice Department’s arguments that informing the Congress at this juncture might influence the elections.
The Comey’s letter has already stirred a political firestorm bringing him under intense criticism for his timing and for bucking the Justice Department’s guidance not to tell Congress about the development.
Investigators will now look at whether the newly uncovered emails contain classified information or other evidence that could help advance the Clinton email probe. It is possible, though, that the messages could be duplicative of others already recovered elsewhere or that they could be a collection of benign, personal notes.
Meanwhile, a Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll found that more than six in 10 likely voters said the FBI’s announcement would make no difference in their vote. A little more than three in 10 said the news made them less likely to support Clinton, though about two-thirds of those were Republicans or Republican-leaning independents.
It was reported that the FBI investigators were using specially designed software to look into newly found 650,000 emails from the computer of ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner, the husband of Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin.
Though Abedin declined to accept the knowledge of those emails on her husband’s computer, the FBI agents have already started probe to ascertain her claim.
The software being used by the FBI can search keywords pertaining to national security, from thousands of emails, in a matter of minutes. Once filtered, those emails – which may have breached the American national security – would be manually analysed.