The electronic device shared by Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and husband Anthony Weiner on which the FBI found more Clinton emails was a laptop and it contained tens-of-thousands of emails, a senior law enforcement official told Fox News on Saturday.
The FBI announced Friday that it had restarted an investigation into emails Clinton sent on a private server system while secretary of state, as a result of a probe into Abedin’s husband, disgraced New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner, “sexting,” or sending sexually-suggestive electronic messages, to a teenage girl.
The law enforcement official told Fox News that the laptop had “five digits” of emails, meaning tens-of-thousands of them. However, federal investigators remain unclear whether Abedin or Weiner own the laptop.
The FBI conducted a roughly two-year investigation into Clinton’s use of a private server system, finding several emails marked as classified and concluding that she had been “extremely careless.” However, the agency did not find evidence that Clinton had been criminally negligent and did not recommend criminal charges to the Justice Department.
People familiar with the case say the FBI started looking at the new cache of emails because the agency thought they were “pertinent to the investigation.”
The source also told Fox News that law enforcement officials think it’s highly unlikely that all of the new-found emails are duplicates, as the Clinton campaign has suggested.
Senior officials say the US Justice Department opposed the FBI’s plan to inform Congress of the discovery of new relevant emails.
However, FBI Director James Comey disregarded their request, saying, “In the end, we decided it was better to keep Congress informed.”
97% of US Justice Department officials support Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
The newest set of emails was found during an investigation of former Congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, had used the same computer enabling a new cache of Clinton emails, her correspondence with Abedin, to be discovered.
The FBI has not yet analyzed the Clinton-Abedin email correspondence to see if it contains classified information.
The FBI does not usually tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but in this case, Comey felt obligated to do so,
“Here I feel an obligation to do so, given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed,” he said. “I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. At the same time, however, given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of e-mails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression.”
Democratic senators also wrote a letter asking the FBI to provide information about their renewed probe into the Clinton email scandal.
“Just ten days before a presidential election, the American people deserve more disclosure without delay regarding the FBI’s most recent announcement,” they wrote. “Anything less would be irresponsible and a disservice to the American people.”
The Clinton email scandal had been considered closed until the FBI announced it was renewing its probe on Friday. While Clinton was originally optimistic, she now admits to being “deeply troubled” by the probe and its possible implications for her campaign.