While investigating charges that former Congressman Anthony Weiner sent obscene pictures of himself to an underaged girl, the FBI found on his computer e-mails that Hillary Clinton had written to his wife, top aide Huma Abedin.
Those e-mails contained something that has caused FBI Director James Comey to re-open the investigation into Clinton’s illegal e-mail arrangement. Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein thinks whatever they found must be a bombshell.
FBI Director James B. Comey decided to inform Congress that he would look again into Hillary Clinton’s handling of emails during her time as secretary of state for two main reasons: a sense of obligation to lawmakers and a concern that word of the new email discovery would leak to the media and raise questions of a coverup.
The rationale, described by officials close to Comey’s decision-making on the condition of anonymity, prompted the FBI director to release his brief letter to Congress on Friday and upset a presidential race less than two weeks before Election Day. It placed Comey again at the center of a highly partisan argument over whether the nation’s top law enforcement agency was unfairly influencing the campaign.
In a memo explaining his decision to FBI employees soon after he sent his letter to Congress, Comey said he felt “an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed.”
“Of course, we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record,” Comey wrote to his employees.
