The controversy surrounding FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress 11 days before the election has resurfaced in a major way. On Tuesday, the warrant connected to the FBI search was revealed and legal experts who have reviewed the document saying the warrant should have never been granted.
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The FBI Director permanently changed the momentum in the presidential race 11 days before the election by sending Congress a letter saying the agency had discovered new evidence in its previously closed investigation into the emails Hillary Clinton. Clinton had a significant lead in the polls at the time Comey sent the letter.
However it turns out that when James Comey sent the letter, the FBI did not yet have a warrant to search the laptop in question. Meaning Comey’s cryptic letter suggesting possible new evidence in the case was purely conjecture. Two days after the Comey sent the letter, FBI agents applied for a warrant to search the laptop it had seized as part of an investigation into Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal.
A Clinton campaign spokesperson tweeted Tuesday, that the unsealed warrant “reveals Comey’s intrusion on the election was as utterly unjustified as we suspected at time,”
Of course, Clinton’s significant lead in the polls began to shrink immediately following Comey’s announcement. And Comey and the FBI waited until just days ahead of election to announce that its search was complete and that it found no new evidence.
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The Clinton campaign believes that her election loss is in part attributable to to Comey’s letter saying that it helped depress turnout and drove away critical support of swing voters. Polls during that time suggest they are correct in thinking the FBI Director’s letter had that impact on the race.
According to the Washington Post, David Kendall a long time Clinton lawyer said of the FBI warrant that investigators, “had no basis to conclude whether these e-mails were even pertinent to that closed investigation, were significant, or whether they had, in fact, already been reviewed prior to the closing of the investigation. What does become unassailably clear, however, is that as the sole basis for this warrant, the FBI put forward the same evidence the Bureau concluded in July was not sufficient to bring a case ― the affidavit offered no additional evidence to support any different conclusion,” Kendall told The Washington Post.
