FBI obtains warrant to examine newly discovered emails

NBC News reports that the FBI has now obtained a warrant to look at the newly discovered emails found on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner during a separate investigation of his alleged communications with an underage girl:

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The warrant came two days after FBI director James Comey revealed the existence of the emails, which law-enforcement sources said were linked to Weiner’s estranged wife, top Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

The FBI already had a warrant to search Weiner’s laptop, but that only applied to evidence of his allegedly illicit communications with an underage girl.

Meanwhile, news keeps trickling out about the ongoing investigation. Saturday night the Washington Post reported (via an anonymous source) that Huma Abedin is saying she has no idea how these emails wound up on her husband’s laptop:

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.

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.

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And according to a Fox News report today, it’s not just a handful of Huma’s emails that wound up on the laptop. Investigators believe there are at least 10,000 emails of interest, and they suspect not all of those are duplicates:

On Saturday, a senior law enforcement official told Fox News that the laptop contained “five digits,” or at least 10,000, emails of interest to investigators.

The source also told Fox News that law enforcement officials think it’s highly unlikely that all of the newfound emails are duplicates, as the Clinton campaign has suggested.

Finally, there’s more detail from the Wall Street Journal about the total number of emails the FBI will need to search through plus the fact that these may be to or from Clinton’s server:

Federal agents are preparing to scour roughly 650,000 emails contained on the laptop of former Rep. Anthony Weiner to see how many relate to a prior probe of Hillary Clinton’s email use, as metadata on the device suggests there may be thousands sent to or from the private server that the Democratic nominee used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter.

All that seems at odds with what was circulating on the left within a few hours of Comey’s letter being published Friday. For instance, this tweet from Sam Stein was retweeted over 9,000 times:

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If the WSJ story is correct, this does involve emails “to or from” Clinton’s private server (scratch claim #2). And if Fox News is right then it involves a whole lot more than 3 emails (scratch claim #4). As for whether this involves “Clinton-sent” emails, it’s not clear to me how anyone could know that. The FBI hasn’t looked at the emails and Abedin is saying, according to the Post, she doesn’t even know how any of this got there (claim #1 looking dubious). In short, everything the left was saying to downplay this story a couple days ago may turn out to be false.

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