What a day! With the news cycle (maybe) winding down for the night, let’s review what we (think we) know and don’t know about today’s revelations.
What we know:
- FBI director James Comey—who announced in July that he would not recommend prosecuting Hillary Clinton for having classified material on a private email server while she was secretary of state—sent a letter to Congressional committee chairs informing them that new emails related to the Clinton investigation had been discovered. Comey said the new emails will be examined to determine if they contained classified material.
- It’s since been reported that those emails were discovered on a computer jointly used by Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner. Weiner is under investigation for possibly having exchanged explicit sex messages with a minor; he and Abedin, Clinton’s campaign co-chair, are married but estranged. The emails in question were reportedly sent to Clinton by Abedin.
- NBC reports that the FBI does not believe Clinton intentionally withheld the emails from the batch she initially turned over to investigators. Comey said in July that, while the FBI’s investigation had turned up some relevant emails that Clinton herself hadn’t handed over, there was no evidence that those emails were hidden intentionally rather than simply having been deleted in the normal course of business or missed when her lawyers were sorting her personal-server emails into work and personal groups.
- NBC’s Pete Williams is reporting that his sources don’t think the new emails are a “game changer” as far as the decision not to recommend prosecuting Clinton goes.
- Fox News is reporting that no classified material has of yet been found in the new emails.
- Fox is also reporting that Comey wrote, in an FBI internal memo, that he took the unusual step of making information about an ongoing investigation public because he felt it would have been inappropriate to withhold information of such public relevance until after the election.
What we don’t know:
- How likely it is that there will eventually be classified information found on the new Abedin-to-Clinton emails.
- Exactly how many Abedin-Clinton emails the FBI is looking at. (There have been conflicting numbers thrown around.)
- When the FBI’s investigation will be done.
That’s where we stand. More to come, one assumes.
