A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election

Oversight and Review Division 18-04 June 2018

CHAPTER NINE:

DISCOVERY OF CLINTON EMAILS ON THE

WEINER LAPTOP AND REACTIVATION OF THE MIDYEAR

INVESTIGATION

In this chapter, we discuss the discovery of Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop and the eventual reactivation of the Midyear investigation. Section I details the discovery of these emails by the FBI’s New York Field Office (NYO) and Section II discusses the numerous notifications of this fact to FBI Headquarters in late September and early October. Section III describes the initial response by FBI Headquarters and Midyear personnel to this discovery. Section IV discusses NYO’s processing of the Weiner laptop. Section V details the ensuing inaction by FBI Headquarters and Midyear personnel, and the explanations we received from FBI leadership and Midyear personnel for this inactivity. In Section VI, we discuss the Weiner case agent’s concerns about this inactivity and, in Section VII, we describe the actions taken by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) as a result of these concerns. In Section VIII, we discuss the response by the Department and FBI to SDNY’s notification about the Weiner laptop. Section IX examines the reengagement on this issue by FBI Headquarters and Midyear personnel. Section X describes the events that led to the decision to seek a search warrant for the Weiner laptop. We provide our analysis in Section XI.

1. Discovery of Emails by the FBI’s New York Field Office
2. Seizure of Weiner Laptop and Devices

In September 2016, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) began investigating former Congressman Anthony Weiner for his online relationship with a minor. The FBI’s New York Field Office (NYO) was in charge of the investigation. A federal search warrant was obtained on September 26, 2016, for Weiner’s iPhone, iPad, and laptop computer. The FBI obtained these devices the same day. The search warrant authorized the government to search for evidence relating to the following crimes: transmitting obscene material to a minor, sexual exploitation of children, and activities related to child pornography.

1. Emails and BlackBerry PIN Message Viewed by Case Agent

The case agent assigned to the Weiner investigation was certified as a Digital Extraction Technician and, as such, had the training and skills to extract digital evidence from electronic devices. The case agent told the OIG that he began processing Weiner’s devices upon receipt on September 26. The case agent stated that he noticed “within hours” that there were “over 300,000 emails on the laptop.”

The case agent told us that on either the evening of September 26 or the morning of September 27, he noticed the software program on his workstation was having trouble processing the data on the laptop.165 The case agent stated that he

went into the email folder on the laptop to see why the processing was “hung up.”

He explained that, because the laptop was still processing, he was only able to view the emails that were immediately visible in the window on his computer screen. The case agent told us that the first item he clicked on was “either an email between Hillary and Huma [Abedin] or a BlackBerry PIN message.” The case agent stated that, in the window of items visible to him, he saw a “couple” of emails between Clinton and Abedin and at least one BlackBerry PIN message between Clinton and Abedin. The case agent told us that the BlackBerry PIN message in

particular caught his attention because his “general understanding” was that those messages reside on a “BlackBerry proprietary-like backbone” and would not “leave much of a trace because it doesn’t go through any external servers other than a BlackBerry server.” When asked specifically how he identified this BlackBerry PIN message as being between Clinton and Abedin, the case agent stated that “it was obvious” from the domains, which were “something like HR15@BBM-dot•something, and HAbedin@BBM-dot.” With respect to the emails he observed, the case agent said he recalled seeing emails associated with “about seven domains,” such as yahoo.com, state.gov, clintonfoundation.org, clintonemail, and hillaryclinton.com.

The case agent told us that he asked another agent to take a quick look at his computer to “make sure, am I, am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?” The other agent told the OIG that he “vividly” recalled what he described as the “oh-shit moment” when the case agent said that Hillary Clinton’s emails were on the laptop. The other agent stated that, while he did not view the content, he believed that he did see the domain portion of the emails and remembered thinking at the time that it was the same domain that had been associated with Clinton in news coverage. The other agent told the OIG that he and the case agent agreed that this information needed “to get reported up the chain” immediately.

1. Reporting of Clinton-Related Emails to FBI NYO Supervisors

The case agent told us that, after speaking with the other agent, he immediately told his Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) what he had observed, including that he had seen “private BlackBerry messages, private messages between Hillary and Huma to which Anthony Weiner was not a party.” The NYO SSA corroborated this account, stating that the case agent came into his office on September 27 and told him “he had discovered emails that could be tied to Hillary

165 No electronic record exists of the case agent’s initial review of the Weiner laptop. The case agent told us that at some point in mid-October 2016 the NYO ASAC instructed the case agent to wipe his work station. The case agent explained that the ASAC was concerned about the presence of potentially classified information on the case agent’s work station, which was not authorized to process classified information. The case agent told us that he followed the ASAC’s instructions, but that this request concerned him because the audit trail of his initial processing of the laptop would no longer be available. The case agent clarified that none of the evidence on the Weiner laptop was impacted by this, explaining that the FBI retained the Weiner laptop and only the image that had been copied onto his work station was deleted. The ASAC recalled that the case agent “worked through the security department to address the concern” of classified information on an unclassified system. He told us that he did not recall how the issue was resolved.

Clinton.” The SSA told us that he specifically recalled the case agent mentioning

domain names associated with Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and possibly Clinton for President. The SSA also recalled the case agent telling him “early on” that there were “hundreds of thousands” of emails. The case agent and SSA told us that because the search warrant for the laptop was limited to child exploitation offenses, they agreed during this meeting that the emails were not covered under the search warrant and the case agent should not review those emails. The SSA and the case agent met with their Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) to make him aware of the emails. The ASAC told us that the SSA and case agent initially briefed him on September 28. The ASAC stated they reported that the laptop was still processing, but there were approximately 141,000 emails of interest at that moment. The ASAC further stated that the case agent and SSA identified seven different domains of interest. The ASAC’s notes from the morning of September 28 corroborated this account. The notes included references to “imaging, processing ••• way through,” “141k emails,” and seven domains, which were @clinton.com/gov, @state.gov, @clintonemail.com, @AW.com, @clintonfoundation.org, @presidentclinton.com, and @hillaryclinton.com.

The ASAC told us that he immediately instructed the case agent and SSA to

stay focused on the Weiner investigation and to “stay completely out of” the Clinton

email case. The SSA and case agent stated that the ASAC told them to stop reviewing the emails pending further guidance from FBI Headquarters. The ASAC told us that he briefed the information that he received from the SSA and case agent to his immediate supervisor, the Acting SAC (A/SAC), that day. The A/SAC confirmed this account, stating that he was “told there were emails here related to Hillary Clinton and others.”

According to both the A/SAC and NYO Assistant Director in Charge (ADIC) William Sweeney, the A/SAC relayed this information to Sweeney on September 28 immediately after the FBI’s weekly 3:00 p.m. secure video teleconference (SVTC) for SACs, which is a SVTC held by the Director or, in his absence, the Deputy Director or another FBI senior executive. The weekly SAC SVTC is followed by another SVTC for FBI Assistant Directors (AD). Sweeney explained:

Between those two SVTCs, so there’s a pause so all the other offices bail out, and then they basically reset. Between that pause I think is the first time I hear about Clinton domain names on this thing. And that comes from [the A/SAC]…. And so he tells me about this laptop. I don’t know if he described [it as] a laptop, but I think he did. Hey, and there’s a whole bunch of Clinton email domain names. I don’t know if he described it as domain names, but, and I wrote them on an index card—which I can’t find for the life of me right now. But it was like Clinton.com, state-dot—like, it was clearly it was her stuff. And that they had about 141,000.

The A/SAC told us that he and Sweeney both had concerns about not exceeding the scope of the Weiner search warrant. The A/SAC’s notes from that meeting stated, “400 PM—Spoke w/Sweeney. Do not do anything with the emails [illegible] move forward with other agents.”

1. Reporting of Clinton-Related Emails to SDNY

On September 27, the case agent also began advising the two SDNY Assistant United States Attorneys (AUSA) assigned to the Weiner case about what he was finding on the Weiner laptop. Many of the case agent’s communications with SDNY were captured in a timeline created by the two AUSAs detailing key events in the Weiner investigation in September and October 2016. This timeline was created in late October and AUSA 2 told us that she and AUSA 1 created the timeline because they thought that “at some point somebody is going to want to know sort of what was happening when, and [it’s] better to piece this together now.” That timeline showed, and the prosecutors confirmed during interviews, that the case agent first told the prosecutors about the presence of Abedin’s emails on the Weiner laptop on September 27. Similar communication was also occurring between higher levels of NYO and SDNY. On September 27 at 3:30 p.m., the A/SAC and SDNY Deputy U.S. Attorney Joon Kim spoke by telephone. The A/SAC’s notes stated, “Spoke with Joon Kim who advised we need to be very careful looking

at that server because it is apparently a shared computer with Huma. SDNY will provide protocol and guidance.” Similarly, Kim emailed prosecutors and supervisors at SDNY after the call, “I just got a call from [the A/SAC] about what to do with his computer in light of the facts that there are lots of emails, etc. including what appear to be [Abedin’s]. We need to come up with a clear protocol.”

The AUSAs provided written guidance to the case agent about how to handle review of the laptop. In a September 28 email to the case agent and the SSA, AUSA 1 advised that the case agent should review “only evidence of crimes related to the sexual exploitation of children, enticement, and obscenity” and instructed the case agent “that all emails and other communications between Anthony Weiner and

Huma Abedin (even if there are other parties to the communication) should be sequestered and not reviewed at this time.” The case agent agreed and responded that the “[o]nly emails I will review are those to/from Weiner accounts to which [Huma Abedin] is not party.”

Later in the day on September 28, the AUSA-created timeline noted:

[The case agent] informed AUSAs that the header info previously described seen in plain view search revealed numerous emails between Abedin and HRC (on which Weiner was not a party) using potentially sensitive email addresses, which indicated that Abedin had used the laptop. [The case agent] said that his chain of command was aware of the information. AUSAs informed supervisors of these facts. Later that day, SDNY USAO and FBI NY leadership discussed situation and agreed that Rule 41 prevented any search in this case beyond scope of warrant, and that any emails outside that scope should be segregated and not reviewed in this case. Same day, FBI NY ASAC [] asked AUSA to forward him the guidance for conducting the search that the AUSA had sent to [the case agent] because FBI counsel was interested in issuing guidance for review and seeing what we had already said on this point.

This timeline entry was consistent with testimony by the case agent and AUSAs during their interviews with the OIG.

1. Reporting of Clinton-Related Emails to FBI Headquarters
2. AD Secure Video Teleconference on September 28

As noted above, ADIC Sweeney and the A/SAC both told us that, just before the start of the weekly AD SVTC on September 28, the A/SAC briefed Sweeney about the discovery of emails on the Weiner laptop that were potentially relevant to the Clinton email investigation. The AD SVTC typically includes the FBI Director, the Deputy Director (DD), the Associate Deputy Director (ADD), the General Counsel, all Executive Assistant Directors (EAD), all ADs, and the ADICs of the New York, Los Angeles, and Washington Field Offices. However, on September 28, Comey testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee until approximately 1

p.m. Comey and others told us that Comey was not present for the SVTC, and the SVTC was also not included on his calendar for September 28. Instead, the SVTC was chaired by then DD McCabe, which McCabe told us would be the typical practice in the absence of the Director. McCabe’s calendar for September 28 included time for the weekly SVTC at 3 p.m. The FBI was unable to provide the OIG with a roster of attendees for the September 28 SVTC. However, based upon the leadership structure of the FBI at the time, there would have been approximately 39 FBI executives on the SVTC, including the DD, the ADD, 6 EADs, 28 ADs, and 3 ADICs. Any executive on leave or travel would have typically been replaced by a subordinate.

Sweeney stated that, during the September 28 AD SVTC, he reported that NYO agents involved in the Weiner investigation had discovered 141,000 emails on Weiner’s laptop that were potentially relevant to the Clinton email investigation. Paul Abbate, then the ADIC for the Washington Field Office, recalled Sweeney stating that NYO had discovered “a large volume of emails that might be relevant to the Clinton email matter” on a computer in the Weiner investigation. Abbate told us that he believed Sweeney also provided specific numbers and added that Sweeney “very much emphasized the significance of what he thought they had there.” Abbate described the moment as like “dropping a bomb in the middle of the meeting” and stated that “everybody realized the significance of this, like, potential trove of information.”

Sweeney told the OIG that McCabe responded to his briefing by stating, “Hey, I’m going to Quantico. I’ll call you en route.” Abbate also recalled someone, possibly McCabe, telling Sweeney that they would “talk offline afterwards.” McCabe’s Outlook calendar for September 28 showed that he was scheduled to be at Quantico at 6:00 p.m. that evening.

McCabe told us that he did not remember Sweeney briefing the Weiner laptop issue on a SVTC, although he said it was possible that Sweeney had done so. McCabe explained that the reports by the ADICs on the SVTC are usually “like 10 seconds.” We showed McCabe his notes from September 28, which contained the

following entry: “NY -… Weiner – atty took data off cloud – 2007 emails.” McCabe told us the notes did not refresh his recollection but agreed that they “would be a pretty good indication” that he was made aware of the issue.

Other witnesses also provided recollections of this briefing. Counterintelligence Division AD Priestap (one of the 39 FBI executives who regularly participated in the weekly AD SVTC) told us he vaguely recalled Sweeney mentioning the discovery of emails on the Weiner laptop that were potentially relevant to the Midyear investigation in a forum similar to the AD SVTC. The Human Resources Division AD told us that he recalled Sweeney mentioning “emails relevant to the Clinton investigation” that had been discovered on a laptop associated with Anthony Weiner. He added, “I remember Bill saying like hey, we think there’s some stuff on here you guys may not have seen.”

Comey, who was not present for the SVTC, stated that he was unaware that Sweeney had reported the discovery of Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop during the September 28 AD SVTC. When asked if this was information he would have expected to have been told, he stated, “Yeah, I would think so,” adding that he was surprised that he had not been informed.

1. McCabe Post-SVTC Phone Call and Meeting on September 28
2. Phone Call with Sweeney

Sweeney told us that he had not heard back from McCabe after the September 28 SVTC, so he called McCabe on his drive home that evening. Phone records show two calls from Sweeney to McCabe on September 28. The first occurred at 4:51 p.m. and lasted for 9 minutes and 50 seconds, and the second occurred at 5:03 p.m. and lasted for 56 seconds. In addition, Sweeney’s Outlook calendar for that day contained the following entry at 5:00 p.m.: “Telcal w/DD re: Weiner invest & Garner.” Sweeney stated that NYO personnel had continued processing the laptop in the time since the initial notification on the AD SVTC and he had been informed there were now 347,000 emails on the laptop. Sweeney told us that he informed McCabe that there were now 347,000 emails.

McCabe, who told us that his earliest recollection of learning about the Weiner laptop was in a telephone call with Sweeney in late September or early October, recalled Sweeney informing him that NYO had seized a laptop from Anthony Weiner “and they thought there would be Clinton stuff in it.” When asked what Sweeney specifically told him, McCabe stated, “I just remember him saying we think, you know, like, we’ve got this laptop and we opened it up, and it looks like there’s stuff on there from Clinton, and, you know. Oh, my gosh, what do we do kind of thing.” McCabe also recalled that Sweeney made “very clear” that “it was a large volume” of emails. McCabe stated that he understood “large volume” to mean “like many thousands of emails.” McCabe recalled telling Sweeney that Counterintelligence Division personnel and NYO personnel should connect “[t]o figure out, like, what do we have or what do we do with this?”

McCabe stated that shortly after this call he contacted Priestap and said, “[Y]ou need to get somebody up to New York right away to take a look at what they have because it might be Clinton emails.” Priestap told us that he did not recall either this conversation or McCabe telling him to send a team to New York to examine the Weiner laptop. As described below, Priestap’s emails on the evening of September 28 reflect that he spoke with Sweeney and then instructed Strzok to have someone from his team contact NYO regarding the information.

2. Meeting with Strzok and Priestap

Our review of Strzok’s text messages revealed that McCabe discussed the Weiner laptop with Strzok and Priestap on September 28. Later that same day, Strzok and Page discussed the meeting in a series of text messages. Their exchange is quoted below. The sender of each text message is identified after the timestamp.

7:25 p.m., Strzok: “Got called up to Andy’s earlier…hundreds of thousands of emails turned over by Weiner’s atty to sdny, includes a ton of material from spouse. Sending team up tomorrow to

review…this will never end….”

7:27 p.m., Page: “Turned over to them why?”

7:28 p.m., Strzok: “Apparently one of his recent texting partners may not have been 18…don’t have the details yet”

7:29 p.m., Page: “Yes, reported 15 in the news.”

7:31 p.m., Strzok: “And funny. Bill [Priestap] and I were waiting outside his door. He was down with the director….”

7:51 p.m., Strzok: “So I kinda want to go up to NY tomorrw [sic], coordinate this, take a leisurely Acela back Friday….”

Strzok stated that he was sure that “got called up to Andy’s” referred to McCabe’s office, but he had no recollection of that meeting. Strzok could not recall who first told him about the Weiner laptop, only recalling that someone told him that some “Clinton-type emails” had been discovered in New York. Strzok’s notes from September 28 stated, “NY invest Weiner sexting 15 y’o. Weiner atty produces copy of everything Weiner has on iCloud to SDNY. Significant email from Huma [NFI – their email vs. her independent email]? Relevance to MYE, Clinton Foundation? MYE go review.” Strzok stated that he initially planned to send a team to New York to review the emails, but that a conference call with NYO was scheduled instead. (This conference call, which occurred on September 29, is discussed below.)

Strzok told us that he did not consider the new information all that noteworthy because “throughout the summer [we had] retired Foreign Service officers…any number of people coming and saying, hey, I’ve got, you know, a handful of emails related to, you know, the Secretary or Cheryl Mills or something. And so we would run if they, we thought they had potential merit. We would track them down.” Strzok conceded that this lead was more credible since it came from an FBI field office and involved information obtained from Abedin’s husband. He added, though, “[T]here is no inkling, there is not a shadow of the, you know, what’s going to unfold a month later.”

Page said she believed the September 28 text message from Strzok was the first time she heard about the emails on the Weiner laptop and told us that she knew little information about it. Page explained that she was “not really that involved” in “most of the October stuff.” Page stated her lack of involvement was due in part to the FBI’s Russia investigation. Page explained that the many of the supervisors on the Midyear team were also assigned to the Russia investigation and they were “super-occupied” with the Russia investigation during October. Page stated that most of her information about the Weiner laptop came from either Strzok or FBI Attorney 1.

We showed McCabe these text messages and he said he did not recall talking to Strzok about the Weiner laptop on September 28. McCabe also did not recall Sweeney describing the quantity of emails numerically, other than to say there were a “large volume.” When asked about Strzok’s text message that he was “sending [a] team up tomorrow to review,” McCabe noted that the text message would be consistent with what McCabe told Priestap. McCabe told us that the issue of the Weiner laptop “kind of falls off my radar” at this point, but when he reengaged with the team at a later point (he could not recall the amount of time that had elapsed), he discovered, “that [the team] did go up, but there [was] a problem, a legal, you know, an access problem because what they want to look for [was] not covered within the warrant, and yada, yada, yada.” McCabe could not recall who told him this information about the trip to New York, but speculated it was Priestap.

1. Comey and McCabe Communications After AD SVTC on September 28

Phone records show two phone calls between McCabe and Comey on the evening of September 28. The first call was from McCabe to Comey at 7:34 p.m. for 1 minute and 31 seconds. The second call was from Comey to McCabe at 8:36

p.m. for 8 minutes and 13 seconds. McCabe told us he could not recall the content of either phone call. When asked specifically if they discussed the issue of the Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop, McCabe said he did not recall and noted that he would talk with Comey at the end of the day on an almost daily basis. Additionally, as noted above, Strzok’s text message on September 28 reflected that, while Strzok was waiting outside McCabe’s office to meet with him regarding the Weiner laptop emails, McCabe “was down with the director.” McCabe told us that he did not recall that and noted that the text message did not “seem consistent” with McCabe’s calendar, which showed that he was at Quantico the evening of September 28.

McCabe said he recalled talking to Comey about the Weiner laptop issue “right around the time [McCabe] found out about it.” McCabe described it as a “fly•by,” where the Weiner laptop was “like one in a list of things that we discussed.” McCabe continued, “[A]nd it would have been like, hey, Bill Sweeney called. This is

what he has. I’m going to have [the Counterintelligence Division] take a look at it. I’ll let you know.” McCabe stated that he would have told Comey about the importance of sending a team up the next day in order “to get eyes on this thing and figure out what we have.” McCabe did not recall Comey “weighing in on it at all.” Given the scrutiny of the Clinton email server investigation, we asked McCabe why he believed Comey did not have a stronger reaction to this information and whether this was considered a “big deal.” McCabe responded:

Well, it was a big deal to me. I can’t tell you what he was thinking when I told him about it. But I, I represented to him that we were taking steps to figure out what we had and would come back with some sort of an assessment as to what we need to do. So, I mean, there’s, I’m not sure that there’s anything else that he would have said to do.

Comey told the OIG that he recalled first learning of the presence of the additional emails on the Weiner laptop at some point in early October 2016, although Comey said it was possible this could have occurred in late September. Comey explained:

I was aware sometime in the first week or two of October that there was a laptop that a criminal squad had seized from Anthony Weiner in New York and someone said to me that—and I’m thinking it might have been Andrew McCabe, but someone said to me kind of in passing, they’re trying to figure out whether it has any connection to the Midyear investigation. And the reason that’s so vague in my head is I think—I never imagined that there might be something on a guy named Anthony Weiner’s computer that might connect to the Hillary Clinton email investigation, so I kind of just put it out of my mind.

Comey described himself as having a “reasonably good memory” and speculated, “[T]he reason I didn’t index it is, it was a passing thing that almost seemed like he might be kidding, and so I don’t think I indexed it hard. And I think it was the beginning of October and then I think it disappears from my memory. And then I remember for certain when Andy emails me, I think it’s the 27th [of October] saying, the Midyear team needs to meet with you urgently or right away or

something.”

We asked Comey to explain why this initial information about the Weiner

laptop did not “index” with him given that Abedin was closely connected to Clinton. Comey stated, “I don’t know that I knew that [Weiner] was married to Huma Abedin at the time.” Comey told us that even if he had had known that Abedin was married to Weiner “it wouldn’t have been [at the] top of [my] mind.” Comey also stated that the manner in which he was informed of this information affected his

reaction. Comey told us that he was “quite confident” that he was not told this information in a “sit down” briefing in his office. Instead, Comey thought it most likely that McCabe was “passing the office” and said, “hey Boss, I just want you to know that the criminal squad in New York has got Anthony Weiner[‘s] laptop and I think it may have some connect to Midyear.” Comey said he knew that “if it’s important, Andy [McCabe] will make sure that I focus on it.” Comey said that it “could be” that whoever told him about the Weiner laptop “understated the significance of the information.” He said, “The notion that I knew something important was on that laptop and did what—concealed or hid it or something?—is crazy.”

We asked Comey if McCabe told him that Sweeney had called McCabe about the emails on the Weiner laptop. Comey responded, “No.” We also showed Comey the Strzok text messages and asked him if he recalled being briefed in person by McCabe on September 28. Comey said he did not recall that occurring. Comey stated that he would have expected to be briefed if NYO had discovered a large volume of Hillary Clinton’s emails. However, if NYO had only discovered a large volume of Abedin’s emails, he was not sure that information would be briefed to him since there would not necessarily be a connection to Midyear. He acknowledged, however, that it “would be significant” if the laptop contained Abedin’s emails on a clintonemail.com domain.

We asked Comey, “[I]f [McCabe] had been told on September 28th that there were…at one point 141,000 and at another 347,000 emails related to the Clinton investigation and didn’t tell you, would you be concerned by that?” Comey responded, “Sure, I’d want to know why, what the thinking was.” Since Comey told us he did not recall being told this information, we asked for his reaction. Comey stated:

I’m mystified. First of all doubting, worried that I’m crazy is my first instinct, but I don’t think I’m crazy. You said and I think I would remember if I were being told, so the question is, why wouldn’t you tell me. I always try and keep an open mind and maybe some explanation and one I can’t see, but I’d want to know, why, what’s the thinking. Why didn’t the, given the Director is closely associated with this, why, what’s the reasoning. Maybe there is one I can’t see, but I certainly would want to ask.

As detailed in the next section, Sweeney told us he also called EAD Coleman, EAD Steinbach, and AD Priestap on September 28 regarding the Weiner laptop emails. We asked Comey if any of those officials or anyone else informed him at this time (late September) of Sweeney’s report that Midyear-related information had been discovered on the Weiner laptop. Comey responded, “Unless I’m having a stroke, no. I don’t remember any of that.” We also asked Comey if he would have expected someone on his leadership team other than McCabe to bring this to his attention. Comey stated that he would “not necessarily” have expected this if “they were assuming that the Deputy Director is briefing the Director.” He described the FBI as “a big chain of command place.”

1. Sweeney Calls Other FBI Executives on September 28

In addition to the phone call with McCabe detailed above, Sweeney told us that on September 28 he also called Criminal EAD Randy Coleman, National Security Branch EAD Mike Steinbach, and Counterintelligence AD Bill Priestap with updates on the Weiner laptop. Sweeney stated that he told all three essentially the same thing that he told McCabe, that NYO had continued processing the laptop and the number of emails was now at 347,000.

1. Criminal EAD Coleman

Sweeney’s phone records show several calls with EAD Coleman during the afternoon of September 28. Coleman said Sweeney told him that NYO had reviewed a computer belonging to Anthony Weiner and had found thousands of

“emails that pertain to Clinton…[during] her time as the Secretary of State and to Huma that were connected with the Midyear investigation.” Coleman stated that he told Sweeney to make sure “to let management and headquarters know” about this

development.

Coleman drafted a “Memorandum for Record” on November 7, 2016,

documenting his involvement in the discovery of Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop. Coleman’s memorandum stated, in part:

On 09/28/2016, EAD Randall Coleman received for [sic] call from AD Bill Sweeney indicating team of Agents investigating Anthony Weiner sexting case had discovered emails relevant to Clinton email investigation. AD Sweeney advised team had halted further review and would be requesting guidance from FBIHQ. EAD Coleman agreed and advised he would notify FBI General Counsel James Baker and DD Andrew McCabe. The call was concluded. On 09/28/2016, immediately after call with AD Sweeney, Coleman telephonically contacted DD McCabe at his office number to advise him of the circumstance described by AD Sweeney. DD McCabe advised he had already been made aware of matter.

Coleman told us that he called McCabe immediately because he “considered this important.” Coleman stated that McCabe’s secretary answered his call and he told the secretary to get McCabe on the phone because Coleman “need[ed] to talk to him.” Coleman described his conversation with McCabe as “very short.” Coleman stated, “I said, hey listen, I just got called by Sweeney. Here is what he told me. And I think Andy is like, yeah, I already know. I got it.” After his conversation with McCabe, Coleman told us, “[T]here was no doubt in my mind when we finished that conversation that [McCabe] understood the, the gravity of what the find was.”

McCabe told us he did not recall receiving a phone call from Coleman. He told us Coleman’s memorandum did not refresh his memory, but that he had no reason to doubt Coleman’s account.

2. National Security EAD Steinbach

Steinbach stated that he believed the discovery of Midyear-related material on the Weiner laptop was first discussed at a meeting that he was unable to attend.

Steinbach recalled receiving a phone call from Sweeney “just to give me a heads up saying, hey, you weren’t here but just FYI we may have found something.”

Steinbach told us this conversation may have occurred in late September. Steinbach said he could not recall specifics and stated that he did not think NYO “knew exactly what they had” at the time, but added that he received “some indication that there may be some Clinton domain emails.”

3. Counterintelligence AD Priestap

On September 28, at 7:04 p.m., Priestap sent an email to Strzok, with the Lead Analyst and the NYO A/SAC copied, that stated, “I spoke to Sweeney. Our agent and analyst should call [the NYO A/SAC]…. Sweeney said [the A/SAC] will get them access to what they need.” At 9:26 p.m. on September 28, Sweeney sent the following email to Priestap, “Bill, The NYO POC for the sensitive email issue is A/SAC [] (cc’d). He can coordinate for your team. Have a quiet night. – Bill.”

Priestap told us he could not recall if he heard about the discovery of Midyear-related material on the Weiner laptop during the September 28 AD SVTC. However, Priestap stated that he thought Sweeney “mentioned something to that effect in one of those” forums. Priestap told us that believed that he first learned of this issue in a phone call with Sweeney. Priestap described what information he was provided, stating:

When I first was told about it, if I’m recalling correctly, it was something to the effect of it’s Anthony Weiner’s laptop or computer…. His wife’s emails are on it. And his wife has email communication with the former Secretary, or probably then Secretary. And that the time frame overlaps with some of the time frame we were interested in. In other words, it was explained like this is in…the Midyear lane. I don’t remember getting into any volume then, although…one of my first questions, if not the first question is, I would ask is what’s the volume.

Priestap told us that he “would have certainly talked” to his immediate supervisor, EAD Steinbach, about this information because “the bottom line is this was explosive.” Priestap stated that he did not recall talking to McCabe directly, although he stated that he may have if Steinbach was out of the office that day. Priestap stated that either he or Steinbach would have advised McCabe of “something of this magnitude” very quickly. Priestap described the information he received from Sweeney about the Weiner laptop as “hot information” and stated, “[I]t’s the type of thing where I don’t need an appointment. I walk upstairs and just, I make sure they know that before they go home.”

III.       Initial Response of FBI Headquarters to Discovery of Midyear-Related Information on the Weiner Laptop

1. Phone Call between Sweeney and Priestap on September 29

On September 29 at 6:09 a.m., Sweeney sent the following email to Priestap, “Can you give me a call on the ride in? Not clear under what authorities we have. Thx.” Sweeney told us that he conveyed to Priestap in the phone call that NYO did not have the legal authority to look at the Midyear-related material on the Weiner laptop. Priestap told us he could not recall this specific conversation, but noted that it would be standard practice to examine what legal authority was needed. At 8:12 a.m., the A/SAC forwarded to Sweeney the 7:04 p.m. email from Priestap the night before. The A/SAC stated, “FYI There is no way that they can just look at the emails. I even went over the guidance from SDNY. Not happening unless they have some authority I am in the dark on. Let me known [sic] if you

want to discuss.”

At 9:02 a.m. on September 29, Sweeney forwarded Priestap the September 28 email from SDNY AUSA 1 (detailed above) advising the Weiner case agent on the limited scope of the Weiner search warrant and instructing him not to review any communication to which Abedin was a party. Priestap forwarded the email to FBI Attorney 1 and commented, “Per our conversation.” Priestap described FBI Attorney 1 as someone he typically relies on when legal issues arise. FBI Attorney 1 confirmed that Priestap told her about the issue with the Weiner laptop and asked her “to follow up on it.” We asked FBI Attorney 1 what she understood this to mean. FBI Attorney 1 told us that she believed there was a question of whether the Midyear team should go to New York and review the Weiner laptop. FBI Attorney 1 continued, “And, you know, we had over the course of the investigation, we would have various means of people saying, we have all of Clinton’s emails. And so this was just to follow up on that. This obviously is more, a more solid lead than some of the other things we had, but it was just to find out really what were the details of this. Should we send a team up there.”

1. Conference Call between NYO and Midyear Personnel on September 29

Early on September 29, the Midyear SSA called the NYO A/SAC supervising the Weiner investigation and, according to the A/SAC, informed the A/SAC that he was the supervisor of the Clinton email server investigation. The A/SAC and SSA both told us that they had a brief discussion about what NYO had found on the Weiner laptop. The A/SAC stated, “I’m sure I told him exactly what I’d been representing to others, that, look, there are a lot of emails. You may want to get a search warrant. We can’t, we’re not looking at anything. That’s the normal stuff I would have said.” The SSA stated that the A/SAC told him, “[W]e’ve got some Clinton emails here, explained what it was. And they weren’t sure what to do with it in that it was outside the scope of what they were working on.” The SSA stated that the A/SAC explained that NYO wanted to notify FBI Headquarters about what they had found and were also seeking “guidance on how to deal with this.”

The A/SAC and SSA scheduled a conference call, also known as a Lync call, between NYO and Midyear personnel at 11:30 a.m. that morning. Nine people participated in this conference call. This included the NYO A/SAC, ASAC, and SSA supervising the Weiner investigation; a NYO SSA assigned to public corruption matters; and five members of the FBI Midyear team: the SSA, FBI Attorney 1, Agent 2, and two analysts. FBI Attorney 1 told us that she participated in the call at the request of Priestap. The Midyear SSA told us that he gave Strzok a “heads up” that the SSA was going to have a conference call with NYO about the Weiner laptop.

1. Testimony and Contemporaneous Notes from Call Participants

We interviewed all nine participants to the September 29 call and reviewed the contemporaneous notes taken by eight of them (one participant, the NYO SSA on the Weiner investigation, took no notes).

The NYO participants told us that they provided the Midyear team with an overview of what they had found on the Weiner laptop. This included the fact that the laptop contained “hundreds of thousands” of emails potentially relevant to the Midyear investigation. Both the ASAC and public corruption SSA recalled the number 141,000 being provided. Each of the NYO participants said that the connection to both Hillary Clinton and the Clinton email server investigation was made clear on the call. The ASAC and public corruption SSA told us that NYO reported that there were emails addresses that appeared to be “directly tied” to Abedin and Clinton. NYO personnel stated that they informed the Midyear team that the laptop was “still downloading.” The public corruption SSA’s notes from the call also included the notation “2007 present,” which he explained was the timeline for “the span of information that they had seen to date on the laptop.” Each of the NYO participants told us that the limited nature of Weiner search warrant was discussed. The ASAC stated, “I know that we said to them that the warrant didn’t authorize us to look at these particular emails.” He continued, “And [the Midyear personnel] understood that. There was no pushback from them on that.” NYO personnel told us that they were given no tasks to complete after the call. The ASAC explained, “I had the feeling like the ball is down in somebody else’s court. Because…we were done.”

The Midyear SSA stated that he “knew right off the bat” that NYO had emails from Clinton’s server and that they “appeared to be government in nature.” As for volume, the Midyear SSA recalled that “it wasn’t a one-off” and NYO had seen either “hundreds or thousands” of emails. Either way, the SSA described it as a “significant number.” The Midyear SSA also told us that “content-wise” NYO “had only seen a couple” of emails because “they couldn’t review content.” He said he understood that NYO had seen more of Abedin’s emails, but they had seen Clinton emails as well, including emails from the @clintonemail.com domain. The Midyear SSA told us that he asked NYO personnel why they thought these were Clinton’s emails and NYO responded, “Well, because they’re her initials”, indicating that they had seen something beyond the domain name. The Midyear SSA stated that Midyear personnel were informed that the Weiner search warrant had a very limited scope. He stated that Midyear personnel knew that they “were going to need to get a warrant to review this.” We asked the Midyear SSA if NYO had mentioned seeing BlackBerry domain emails on the Weiner laptop. The SSA responded, “Yeah…. [T]hey had looked from the forensic side, that they had determined that it appeared to be like an entire” file. The Midyear SSA described the conclusion of the call as follows:

Well, from my standpoint, I said we were going to, we were going to address whether we had enough for a warrant. And that we would run this up the chain on our side. And…they agreed especially that they would go back to SDNY and see what the exact parameters of what they could and couldn’t do, because they were not going to cross a line that would compromise their case.

Agent 2, Analyst 1, and Analyst 2 told us that NYO reported a large volume of emails on the laptop and noted that they were still processing the laptop. Notes for each of these three referenced “350k items,” with Agent 2’s notes also stating, “350k items in messages tab.” All three told us that NYO reported the presence of emails related to Clinton. Analyst 1 stated that NYO reported that they had seen metadata showing “what they were characterizing as like [Hillary Clinton’s] email addresses.” Analyst 1 stated that the Midyear team was trying to determine if these were Clinton’s or were from the clintonemail.com domain. Analyst 2 stated that she had only a vague recollection of the call, but told us that she recalled that NYO had seen a large volume of emails between Clinton and Abedin. Agent 2 stated that NYO reported seeing emails from the clintonemail.com domain. Analyst 1’s notes referenced the following domains: state.gov, clinton.com, hillary@clinton.com, clintonfoundation, and clintonemail.com. Analyst 2’s notes included a reference to “2007 dates on PC.” Each of the three also said that NYO emphasized the limited nature of the Weiner search warrant and the fact that the

Midyear team was “going to need to get a warrant to review this.” Agent 2’s notes included the following references: “SDNY advised to avoid emails” and “not looked @ any content.” Analyst 2’s notes included the following references: “SDNY—said put them aside” and “Huma has not waived marrital [sic] priv.” Analyst 2 described the limited nature of the Weiner search warrant as an “overarching theme” of the call.

FBI Attorney 1 provided a slightly different account of the call. She stated that NYO said on the call that it was still processing the evidence and they were not sure “whether or not it had anything to do with” Midyear. FBI Attorney 1 explained:

We didn’t know if it was the right timeframe. So, you know, Huma we knew, Huma had…worked for [Clinton] for a long time. So we weren’t sure of exactly, one, what, how much of the information on this was Huma’s versus Weiner’s. Because we thought it was his laptop. And then, two, whether it would have been relevant to the right timeframe. We were looking for Clinton’s emails, not Huma’s emails. We also knew Huma had a clintonemail address, so she could have been using that for her own personal activities, so we just didn’t know the full extent of what was on there.

When asked about volume, FBI Attorney 1 told us that she “knew that it was a large amount of data” and FBI Attorney 1’s notes from the call referenced “over 350k items.” However, FBI Attorney 1 added:

We always got things that said the data was larger than, it always ended up getting narrowed down after we got more, got it processed more. It doesn’t change for me though, even though the 350k that’s what we think. Like, there was also all the talk about it hadn’t been fully processed. So, to me, that number was just sort of a preliminary number.

FBI Attorney 1 stated that NYO said it had seen either Clinton’s emails or emails from the clintonemail.com domain. FBI Attorney 1 told us that NYO relayed that “SDNY was very concerned about staying within the scope of their warrant.” FBI Attorney 1 stated that the Midyear team told NYO, “well when you get further clarity about what this laptop is, get back to us and let us know, and we’ll try to figure out what to do from there.” She told us that Midyear personnel specifically requested that NYO look for emails related to the clintonemail.com domain. When asked whether NYO was supposed to create an inventory or list for Midyear, FBI Attorney 1 stated that she “thought we talked about [the Weiner case agent] not being able to do that. Because of the instructions. I mean, because of how the warrant was drafted.” FBI Attorney 1’s notes were entitled “NYO Lync – MYE Emails” and included references to “image – not complete b/c so large,” “SDNY told them to avoid emails,” “over 350k items – including emails + IMs different addresses including state.gov Clinton.com,” “not sure if they saw clintonemail.com,” “WFO interest -@clintonemail.com @state.gov,” and “2009•2013 time frame / early next week.”

2. Post-Call NYO Communications

Shortly after the call concluded, at 11:52 a.m., the NYO ASAC forwarded to the Midyear SSA and FBI Attorney 1 the September 28 email from AUSA 1 to the Weiner case agent (detailed above) outlining the limited scope of the Weiner search warrant and providing instructions for the case agent’s search of the laptop. The ASAC told us that he forwarded this email to make sure “they understood the directives that we had from [SDNY] in terms of limitations and really kind of under what circumstances we would be able to look at anything that was attached to an email.” Witnesses in NYO and SDNY told us that the case agent was told not to affirmatively search the emails for information unrelated to the Weiner child exploitation investigation. At 12:42 p.m. on September 29, the A/SAC informed Sweeney by email: “Just had the lync call with HQ/WFO. They were misinformed about the accessibility. All good for now. We can discuss further if you like.”

The NYO A/SAC and ASAC told us they did not recall any tasking of NYO related to the material on the Weiner laptop that was potentially relevant to the Midyear investigation. The A/SAC told us, “I fully expected [the Midyear team] to reach back out to ask me for certain things, and, and for assistance of some sort. I know that’s what I’d do.” The NYO A/SAC, ASAC, and SSA told us they had no further contact with FBI Headquarters about the Clinton email issue until late October. The SSA told us that he felt like NYO had done its job reporting the information to FBI Headquarters and he “assumed they were doing something.”

3. Post-Call Midyear Team and FBI Headquarters Response

We asked members of the Midyear team what steps were taken immediately after the September 29 call. FBI Attorney 1 recalled discussing the September 29 call with both Strzok and Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson. FBI Attorney 1 stated that it was clear the Midyear team would need “additional process or consent” to be able to do anything with the laptop. Despite this, FBI Attorney 1 stated that she did not reach out to the AUSAs at SDNY at this time. FBI Attorney 1 explained, “[A]fter the SVTC, I thought, well I’m not sure we’re that far along, and I think I get what, where New York is. And so I didn’t feel the need to reach out to SDNY at that time.” We asked FBI Attorney 1 whether NYO was supposed to follow up with the Midyear team or the Midyear team was supposed to follow up with NYO after the call. FBI Attorney 1 stated, “I don’t have an answer to that. I don’t think it was very clear. I would have expected New York to follow up because they were the one that had to process the computer….” We asked FBI Attorney 1 what she expected NYO to do as a result the call. FBI Attorney 1 stated:

I would have expected that the computer would have been processed, New York would have been continuing their investigation, and to the extent that they saw more things that could have helped us—that would have been relevant to our case—they would have reached back out and told us like they did on [October] 26th or whatever that date was, on that Wednesday…. It just took three weeks to do that.

Strzok told us that either the Midyear SSA or FBI Attorney 1 briefed him on the call. In a 12:26 p.m. email to Strzok on September 29, the Midyear SSA stated, “No travel planned for tomorrow. [FBI Attorney 1] will brief you at 1 pm.” FBI Attorney 1 told us she recalled this discussion with Strzok. She stated:

…Bill [Priestap] was wondering if we were going to send a team to New York, to go with them and review this material with them. And based on the call, I didn’t think it was the right time yet. Obviously that’s not my decision as counsel, but I did explain to Pete, like, we didn’t know the volume. We didn’t know if it was related to our material. The search warrant was about Weiner’s activities, so there would be limited utility in sending a team to New York at this point.

Strzok’s notes from September 29 stated, “NY: SW – Saw some @clintonemail.com, @state.gov.” Strzok did not recall being briefed in any detail, but stated that he was told about the limited scope of the Weiner search warrant. Strzok told us his takeaway was:

[T]hat there is material there…. [T]he upshot of what I recall is, you know, we need to, we need to kind of go down this route. It isn’t a crank lead. It is something that we need to look into. There is work they’ve got to do. We’re not there yet, but it isn’t something we can just say, ah, let, there’s nothing relevant there.

Strzok said the next step was for NYO to process the laptop and for NYO to look for the type of data on the laptop that the Midyear team would need. Strzok continued:

[A]nd…when you’re done with that, you know, call us back and let us know. And again…there is no sense of this is going to be huge and horrible and the election is a month away, and God, are we going to say something, do we need to say something to Congress? This is just, oh, good lead and, you know, we’ll get to the end of the year, next year. We’ll get to it as they process through it.

Anderson told us she vaguely recalled a “preliminary conversation” with FBI Attorney 1 on this issue. At 10:27 a.m. on September 29, FBI Attorney 1 sent a message to Anderson on the FBI’s Lync system that stated, “Sorry I missed the

10:15. I was meeting with [Priestap] about a new development in MYE. I believe he also reached out to you, but you were in a meeting. I can bring you up to speed when you have a minute.” Anderson said she recalled a “very skeletal” overview of the facts, including that some Abedin materials may have been found on a laptop obtained in an investigation of Weiner. Anderson said that she was informed that it was unclear what was on the laptop at this point and NYO was going “to try to figure out as much as they could” consistent with the terms of their search warrant.

When asked if FBI Attorney 1 would have been responsible for following up with NYO after the call, Anderson stated, “[I]t wouldn’t have been [FBI Attorney 1’s] job to call New York and say, hey, where are you guys on this? You know, as a lawyer, that’s not what she would have been doing.” Anderson said she thought it would have been the job of “the Midyear investigative team” to reach out to NYO to find out “where things stood.” Anderson did not recall hearing about the Weiner laptop issue again until approximately October 27.

Priestap’s notes from September 29 contained the following entry: “Baker Voluntarily provided emails from 2007 on (347,000 emails) – state.gov, •foundation.gov.” Priestap explained that the “Baker” notation meant that either Priestap received this information from FBI GC Baker or Priestap felt that he needed to tell Baker this information. As noted below, Baker recalled first learning about the Weiner laptop issue from EAD Coleman on October 3. Priestap provided the following interpretation of his notes, “[M]y guess, I’m not positive, is that this was an indication, you know, we thought the time frame was roughly 2007 on, there were roughly this many emails [347,000], and that it included both” State Department and Clinton Foundation business. Priestap told us that he met with the Lead Analyst, Strzok, and FBI Attorney 1 on a nearly daily basis during this period and the information in his notes may have been provided by one of those individuals.

McCabe told us he could not recall if he learned about the September 29 call before or after it occurred.166 He stated that the call was the Midyear team’s way “of following through with my direction to them to kind of get their hands around this thing and let us know what do we have.” We asked McCabe if anyone informed him of the limited scope of the Weiner search warrant at this time and he stated that he did not recall being told that until later. McCabe stated if he had been told

166 As noted in Chapter Eight, McCabe held a meeting on the afternoon of September 29

entitled “Mtg. w/DD RE Decision Points” that Rybicki, Anderson, Strzok, Page, FBI Attorney 1, Baker,

and Priestap were invited to attend. Contemporaneous notes from the meeting reflected a discussion of congressional requests for materials from the Midyear investigation. The notes did not reference the NYO call.

about the limited scope of NYO’s search warrant on September 29, “I would have said well what do we have to do to get another warrant if that’s the route we need to take.”

1. McCabe Call to NSD Leadership on October 3

NSD Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General (DAAG) Mary McCord told us that on or about October 3, she received a phone call from McCabe. McCord stated that this was the first time she learned that there was a potential issue relating to emails in an iCloud account used by Abedin and Weiner. We found no evidence of any other contact between the FBI Midyear team and the Midyear prosecutors regarding any material obtained from Weiner until October 21, as discussed below.

McCord described their conversation as follows:

[W]hat he says to me is that there’s this criminal case. New York is investigating Anthony Weiner. And his counsel…provided a copy of the content of his iCloud account. It includes a substantial number of emails from his wife’s email account. And Andy [McCabe] said he was sending a Midyear agent up to look at what it is. You know, hopefully it’s all duplicates and we don’t have to, you know, worry about, about it. And at the time, he was, he was saying to me you may want to touch base with [SDNY U.S. Attorney] Preet [Bharara] to make sure he’s not like charging ahead like doing some sort of process, like, that would bump up against the work of Midyear.

According to McCord, she and McCabe thought that these emails were likely

duplicates given the “thorough scrub of everything” during Midyear. McCord told us that she did not think this was “a major thing,” but agreed that they should “make sure that there’s nothing new there.”

McCord’s notes from the call stated, “Andy McCabe. NY CRM investigating Anthony Weiner, his counsel provided copy of content of his i-cloud account – includes substantial # of emails from wife’s email account. Andy sending mid-year agent up to look at what it is. Hopefully all duplicates. May want to touch base w/Preet to make sure doesn’t charge ahead. Consent?” McCord stated that the “Consent?” entry was a thought about whether consent would have been “good enough” to allow a forensic review to determine if these were duplicate emails. After the conversation, McCord stated, “And then, honestly, I get busy with things. I don’t really think much about this again until, and I did not call Preet. I just decided it wasn’t” warranted at that time. McCord stated that she did not hear about the issue again until McCabe called a second time later in October. As we discuss below, we believe this call occurred on October 25.

McCabe only vaguely recalled a conversation with McCord. He told us that he believed that he contacted McCord, but he thought that the conversation occurred later in October.

NSD DAAG Toscas recalled being informed of McCabe’s call to NSD in early October and stated that he thought it related to emails in an iCloud account used by Weiner and Abedin. Toscas did not remember the exact timing of the call and thought that McCabe called NSD AAG John Carlin instead of McCord. Nevertheless, the information provided by Toscas was similar to McCord’s testimony. Toscas stated that he did not hear about this issue again until he received a phone call from SDNY Deputy U.S. Attorney Kim on October 21. We discuss that call below.

We also asked NSD AAG Carlin about an early October call between either McCabe and himself or McCabe and McCord related to the Weiner investigation. Carlin, who had announced on September 27, 2016, that he would resign as AAG effective October 15, 2016, told us he did not recall a conversation between McCabe and himself or McCabe and McCord.

1. FBI Headquarters Discussions on October 3 and 4
2. EAD Coleman October 3 Meeting with Baker and Bowdich

As noted previously, Coleman drafted a “Memorandum for Record” on November 7, 2016, documenting his involvement in the discovery of emails on the Weiner laptop that were potentially relevant to the Midyear investigation. The memorandum contained an entry for October 3 that stated, “On or about 10/03/2016, EAD Coleman verbally advised OGC Baker and Associate Deputy Director David Bowdich of the matter described by AD Sweeney in a ‘sidebar’ meeting after normal DD [Deputy Director] daily update meeting. OGC Baker advised he was not aware of the matter and would need to look into it further.” Coleman told us that he believed McCabe was out of the office on October 3 and ADD Bowdich was leading the daily update meeting. McCabe was scheduled to travel to New York on October 3 to attend a symposium the following day.167 Coleman told us that after a meeting on October 3, he informed Bowdich and Baker about the information he had received from Sweeney concerning the laptop. Bowdich told us that he did not “specifically remember” this discussion with Coleman, but had no reason to doubt the memorandum’s accuracy.

We showed Baker the Coleman memorandum and Baker stated that Coleman’s account “sounds about right.” We asked Baker what he was told about the Weiner laptop. Baker stated:

Pretty basic, but along the lines of we have this laptop in this other, unrelated case. And somehow they figured out that there were some additional emails on there that were outside the scope of the warrant, if I recall correctly, that they were working on, and that they needed to do more work to get access to them, and they would be…working on it to try to get access to it.

167 In McCabe’s absence, Bowdich as ADD would run the daily update meeting.

Coleman’s memorandum stated that Baker planned to look into the issue further. We asked Baker about that and he stated he did not recall specifics, but he believed

he asked “somebody on the Midyear team” about the issue.

In the Coleman memorandum’s next and final paragraph, which is undated, it stated,“It was determined by DD McCabe and EAD Steinbach that any follow on investigative activity concerning the emails located on Anthony Weiner’s laptop would be reviewed by the MIDYEAR investigative team.” Coleman said he did not recall why this entry was undated and was unsure at what point this occurred. He told us that he shared an office with Steinbach and that this could have been a dialogue between himself and Steinbach at some point later in October.

2. Email from Bowdich to Comey on October 3

On October 3, at 7:42 p.m., Bowdich sent an email to Comey and McCabe briefing them on items of interest from that day. Rybicki was cc’d on the email, which was entitled “Daily Report.” After highlighting three unrelated items, Bowdich stated, “I asked Randy Coleman to stay behind tomorrow to quickly brief you on the Weiner matter which is growing more complicated, but it can wait until then.” Bowdich told the OIG that he did not remember what was “growing more complicated” with the Weiner matter. Bowdich noted that when dealing with issues of this type he typically “would have pushed that up to Andy, and/or the Director, and Baker would have been right in the middle of it.”

Comey told us he did not recall this email and also did not recall what was “growing more complicated” in the Weiner matter. Comey stated that he was “only dimly” aware of the Weiner child exploitation investigation at this point in time.

We also asked Rybicki about this email. Rybicki stated that he did not know what was meant by “the Weiner matter which is growing more complicated.” Rybicki told us that he first recalled hearing about the issue of Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop on October “26th into the 27th.” When asked if this email made Rybicki think that he and Comey were aware of the Weiner laptop issue earlier than he recalled, Rybicki responded, “I don’t think so…. I remember on the 27th right when I heard about it thinking this is [unintelligible]. That would, that’s my first recollection as well of hearing anything about it.”

3. Meeting between Comey and Coleman on October 4

Comey’s Outlook calendar for October 4 contains an entry for “Morning Briefs” from 8:15 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. that is immediately followed by an entry for “Meeting w/EAD Coleman” from 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Coleman told us that he could not recall this briefing with Comey. Coleman stated that staying behind to brief Comey would be consistent with normal practice, but added that he did not recall this specific instance. Coleman told us that it would be unusual to have a one-on-one meeting with Comey and told us someone else would typically be present at these briefings, such as the DD or ADD. While not remembering this meeting, Coleman speculated that this may have been a one-on-one meeting with Comey to discuss Coleman’s upcoming retirement from the FBI in December 2016.

Coleman told us that he kept regularly took notes in a journal. Coleman’s notes from October 4 contained the following entry:

(1)

Anthony Wiener [sic]

(2)

[Unrelated]

(3)

Wiener [sic] – texting 15 yo – Sexually Explicit

9/26 – Federal SW – IPhone/IPAD/Laptop

Initial analysis of laptop – thousands emails

Hillary Clinton & Foundation

Crime Against Children

We asked Coleman about these notes and he told us that, given their placement in his notebook, the notes would most likely represent information he was briefed on first thing in the morning by his subordinates in the Criminal Investigative Division. Coleman stated that he may have passed this information to other FBI executives after the morning briefing with the Director, but he could not remember if that occurred here.

Comey told us that he did not recall the briefing by Coleman reflected in his calendar. We asked Comey if this briefing could have been the time in early October that he recalled being told about the connection between Midyear and the Weiner investigation. Comey stated:

It’s possible, possible this is what is knocking around in the back of my head, but I really, see I know the frailty of memory from having done a lot of this work, at least in my memory it’s much more of an informal than a meeting about it, but it’s possible.

We showed Coleman’s notes from October 4 to Comey. Comey did not recall being briefed on the information contained in the notes. When asked about Coleman,

Comey said he “thought very highly of him” and described him as a “straight shooter.”

We asked Comey if this information was something that he likely would have “put out of his mind” after being informed of it in early October. Comey responded, “I don’t think so unless, unless the way it was passed to me was with some, you don’t need to do anything. We’re doing, we’re running it down or something. Something that pushed it down on my priority list.”

When asked if he recalled this meeting between Coleman and Comey, Rybicki stated that he did not. Bowdich told us that it is possible that he would have been at this meeting between Comey and Coleman, but he had no recollection of it. McCabe continued to be on travel and was not in Washington, D.C., on October 4.

1. NYO Completes Processing of Weiner Laptop Around October 4

As noted previously, the Weiner case agent told us that he noticed on September 26 or 27 that the software program that he was using on the Weiner laptop was having trouble processing the data on it. The case agent told us that he reached out to a CART examiner for assistance and the CART examiner decided to process the laptop on the CART examiner’s workstation. CART logs show that the CART examiner received the laptop on September 29 and imaged, or made an exact copy of, the laptop the same day. The CART examiner told us that he began using FBI software programs to analyze and categorize the contents of the laptop the next day and that was completed by around October 4. In total, there were approximately 675,000 emails on the laptop.

The CART examiner told us once the processing was completed he conducted a spot check of the results to ensure everything had processed completely. The CART examiner stated that the first file he clicked on was an image of a document

marked “Sensitive But Unclassified” with the initials “HRC” written on it in a blue

felt-tipped marker. The CART examiner stated that he immediately ceased his examination and reported this to the case agent and the CART supervisor. The case agent recalled the CART examiner showing him this document and told us that

he commented, “We can’t be looking at this.”

1. FBI Headquarters Inaction and Explanations for the Delay

After October 4, we found no evidence that anyone associated with the Midyear investigation, including the entire leadership team at FBI Headquarters, took any action on the Weiner laptop issue until the week of October 24, and then did so only after SDNY raised concerns about the lack of action. In this section, we detail the explanations given to us by FBI Headquarters and Midyear personnel about the reasons for this inaction.

When we asked McCabe about this period from late September until late October and the lack of activity on the Weiner laptop, he stated:

During that period in between, you know, I expected that we were making progress on it. I probably met with some combination of the Midyear team every day of that month. Near to every single day on a whole kind of range of Midyear-related issues. And I would have expected that if they were having problems with that issue and not making progress on something that I had put on, on their radar as an important thing, that that would have come to my attention. And it didn’t. So Idon’t,I can’t sit here and tell you with perfect clarity why it didn’t, whether they thought they had it under control but they didn’t, or it was being ignored and not given the attention it, it needed, but it, it didn’t come to me during that time.

McCabe stated that he was “absolutely” disappointed that the team had not found out more information about what was on the Weiner laptop during this period.

McCabe added, “So to find out that we didn’t know the answers to any of those questions at the end of October was very concerning to me.”

FBI Headquarters and Midyear personnel provided multiple explanations for the apparent inactivity on the Weiner laptop during this period. Explanations included claims of delay by NYO in processing the Weiner laptop, a lack of specific information about what had been discovered on the laptop, a focus on the Russia investigation, the fact that the Weiner laptop was not considered a priority during this period, and legal impediments to reviewing the materials on the laptop. We discuss each of these explanations below, recognizing that these explanations are interrelated and not mutually exclusive.

1. Delays in Processing the Weiner Laptop

Numerous witnesses cited delays in processing the Weiner laptop by NYO personnel as a primary reason for the apparent inaction by FBI Headquarters and Midyear personnel. Strzok told us that, after the September 29 call, he understood that NYO was going to continue processing the laptop and then when they were “done with that, you know, call us back and let us know.” FBI Attorney 1 also stated that the Midyear team was waiting on NYO to finish processing the laptop. When asked why it would take so long, FBI Attorney 1 stated that this “is not that long of a period of time for the Bureau to take to get something done.” Rybicki told us that he learned after the fact that NYO had “technical issues” with the laptop, but he did not know “why it took a month.” Comey recalled being told after the fact of a “technical delay” or “something about a glitch with getting a mirror image of the Weiner laptop,” which ultimately “had to be sent to the Operational Technology Division.”

Page stated that NYO was “having trouble” processing the Weiner laptop and “that gap represents the time that New York is getting a workable image of the Weiner laptop because it is so large.” She noted that there was “no particular urgency” on this issue, however. Page explained, “[N]ot to say it’s not an important case, but it’s not, there’s no specific reason why like all hands on deck need to be helping New York CART sort of get this thing loaded or whatever else.” Later in the interview, Page again reiterated that NYO did not really know what they had “until they finally sort of have it up and imaged, and start doing their…forensic review.” She continued:

And the reality is, emails had been found lots of other places that ultimately weren’t worth pursuing lots of other times. And so, until we understand that, that the volume of emails is not simply the volume with respect to Weiner, but that it represents Huma emails as well, you know, my understanding is, like, it’s just not super-significant yet.

1. Prioritization of Weiner Laptop and Russia Investigation

Priestap told us that the Weiner laptop was not his top priority at this time due to his involvement in the Russia investigation. Priestap explained:

[I]f you’re wondering, you know, hey, this is a really big deal, and why aren’t you asking about it every, every minute of every day type thing,

whatever, it was the, we went from this thing to the Russia thing. And the Russia thing took them as much as my time as this thing before.

And I don’t want to say distracted, but yeah. My focus wasn’t on Midyear anymore, even with this new, yes, we’ve got to review it. Yes, it may contain evidence we didn’t know, but I’d be shocked if it’s evidence that’s going to change the outcome of the case because, again…aside from this, did we see enough information previously in

which I felt confident that we had gotten to the bottom of the, of the issue? I did. And so, again, I would have been shocked if it was information that, and so the bottom line is, as important as this was, it was, some ways it was water under the bridge. The issue of the day was what’s, what’s going to be done to possibly interfere with the election.

In written comments provided to the OIG after reviewing the draft report, Priestap further explained:

With respect to the criticism that the FBI should have placed a higher priority on obtaining legal authority to access and review the potentially relevant emails on [the Weiner] laptop, I maintain that we made the correct judgments. In this regard, our work on [Midyear] was extensive and included the review of tens of thousands of emails, (over 7 million email fragments), and interviews of more than 70 individuals. We amassed and analyzed an enormous volume of information, reaching the recommendation in July 2016 that no prosecution be initiated. I sincerely doubted that the emails identified on [the Weiner] laptop were likely to alter our informed view of the matter, and therefore did not prioritize the follow-on work over higher priority matters.

Regarding these higher priority matters, Priestap stated that in late September 2016 Comey had tasked the Counterintelligence Division with a multifaceted effort to protect the 2016 election from foreign interference. This tasking included the

implementation of “a national supply chain risk management effort to identify vulnerabilities in voting infrastructure,” engaging state election officials about potential threats, the investigation of “whether foreign adversaries were attempting to interfere with or improperly influence the” 2016 election, and the investigation of certain U.S. persons’ contacts with foreign adversaries. Priestap told the OIG that, as the AD of the Counterintelligence Division, he was in charge of all of these efforts. Priestap stated:

In sum, I do not believe that the Bureau made a conscious decision to specifically assign a lower priority to the review of [the Weiner] laptop, but rather—given the other extremely significant matters being handled by the Counterintelligence Division and the time typically associated with obtaining legal authority and processing data—it was not viewed as a mission critical activity. My team was prepared to pursue this matter in the normal course, recognizing that it might not be completed until after the presidential election.168

Strzok echoed this notion that the Weiner laptop was not initially his highest priority. He stated:

This is just, you know a lead that likely is going to result in some investigation, maybe some data we’re going to have to review, you know, January, February 2017, whenever it gets done. In my experience, it is not unusual at all for processing to crap out and have to get restarted, or to have problems with certain types of media…. This isn’t a, a ticking terrorist bomb. This is a, you know, again, despite the high-profile nature of the client, a, and a very serious case, something where it goes in the queue and gets prioritized and they’re going through it. So, if you were to ask me, you know, were there alarm bells going off in my head on October 15th that we haven’t heard back? No, absolutely not. I didn’t expect, it would not have surprised me to have heard back in early-November or to have heard back in early-December.

Strzok explained that he had no crystal ball that could have foreseen the events

that ultimately occurred in late October and he thought it “a misplaced assumption

and belief that there should have been some sense of urgency after September 29th, and we should have reprioritized everything we were doing to go after this. We did not know what was there.” Strzok also cited his assignment to the Russia investigation as an explanation for why the Weiner laptop was not seen as his top priority. He stated:

We were consumed by these ever-increasing allegations of [Russian] contacts and coordination and trying to get operations up, and following people…. Doing a lot of stuff that was extraordinarily consuming and concerning. So this pops up, and it’s like…another thing to worry about. And it’s important, and we need to do it. Okay, get it handled. Come back to us, and then back to this, you know, is the government of Russia trying to get somebody elected here in the

United States?”

Likewise, Page stated that she and other members of the Midyear team were “super-focused” on the Russia investigation at this point.

We also asked Comey whether the fact that key members of the Midyear team, including Strzok, were also assigned to the Russia investigation contributed to the delay in reviewing the Weiner laptop. Comey told us that he remembered

168 Priestap further explained his thought process at the time, noting that he considered the Weiner laptop to be an important issue when first informed about it on September 28 and made sure it received his immediate attention. However, Priestap told us that once he was informed of potential legal and technical issues regarding the laptop, he believed from past experience that those issues would take time to resolve and therefore expected no immediate update.

being told that the team assigned to the Russia investigation was “overwhelmed.”

Comey continued:

It was Russia, Russia, Russia all the time…. Well not just Russia, Russia, Russia. [It was also] Midyear Congress, Midyear Congress – because they had, somebody had to review the documents that were going up to Congress and there was a constant demand for documents and briefings on Midyear and Russia at the same time.

We asked Comey if, in retrospect, the team should have been bigger. Comey responded, “Yeah maybe, yeah…. I think that’s a reasonable question to ask and I’m sure in hindsight I needed another Strzok and maybe I needed two teams, and you always have in the Bureau, the challenge is the talent is not necessarily that deep when it comes to counterintelligence matters, people who can work this stuff.”

1. Lack of Specific Information

We were also told that FBI Headquarters and Midyear personnel were waiting on NYO to provide more specific information about what was on the Weiner laptop. FBI Attorney 1 explained:

And you also have to remember too, like, throughout this whole investigation, we would randomly occasionally get someone that said, oh, I know where all the emails are. So…this was more certain than that. But it wasn’t, it wasn’t like, oh, I think we have the smoking gun on this laptop. We better hurry up and make sure we get it processed. It was like let’s see what the process turns out to be. There may not be that much, you know, it may just be duplicative of what we already have.

When asked if she was receiving updates during this period, FBI Attorney 1 stated that she was not and did not know if anyone else was getting updates either. FBI Attorney 1’s supervisor, Anderson, also told us that her understanding was that NYO was processing the materials and trying to figure out what they had during this time period.

Strzok discussed this issue of a lack of information as well, stating that only when NYO reported “the scope and content” of what was on the laptop did it become a significant development. Specifically, Strzok cited the facts that the Weiner laptop contained “a variety of backups from Huma’s devices,” it contained information she forwarded to Weiner, and, most importantly, had BlackBerry

backups from “the missing three months.”169

169 As noted in Chapter Five, the 30,490 emails provided by Clinton’s attorneys contained no

emails sent or received by Clinton during the first two months of her tenure, January 21, 2009, through March 18, 2009, and the FBI investigative team was unable to locate the BlackBerry device she used during that time, although they were able to obtain some of the BlackBerry emails from other sources. Witnesses, including former Director Comey, told us that they believed these missing

emails could contain important evidence regarding Clinton’s intent in setting up a private email server.

The Midyear SSA told us that he believed NYO was able to provide more information on the volume of emails on the laptop later in October. When asked if there was any additional information provided beyond volume, the Midyear SSA

stated that there may have been “something more specific too” that he could not

recall at the time of our interview. The Midyear SSA told us:

I remember walking away the first time thinking that…we probably had enough [probable cause to get a search warrant to review the emails]. But I understood why that discussion wanted to be made, is that, you know, well let’s see what happens…. [T]hat lag in time was as a result of allowing [the Weiner] investigation to proceed. And then they contacted us when they felt that they had a lot more information that needed to be addressed by, by our team. And then we proceeded with moving forward.

The Midyear SSA stated that he did not seek an update from NYO in this period because it was “an [FBI] OGC [and] SDNY type thing.”

1. Questions About Legal Authority

Another reason cited by McCabe, Baker, and Priestap for the inactivity during this period was the need to resolve questions about the legal authority. Priestap explained:

[W]hat is our legal basis by which we can conduct the review? And again…it’s not the first time, and…I run into this all the, all the time with trying to cross the T’s,dot the I’s on the legal end before we take activity. Now, again, why it took so long, should it have took so long? I don’t know. But I saw it as a, let’s, we don’t have, I don’t have knowledge that we have the legal authority to say go.

Baker stated that he thought the Midyear team was “struggling with trying to figure out” a way to access the material on the Weiner laptop since “it was beyond the scope of the original search warrant.” Baker told us he thought that the FBI and SDNY “were continuing to work on” overcoming these “legal complications.”

FBI Attorney 1 did not share this view. She told us that “it had already been concluded” on the September 29 call that the Midyear team would not be able to use the Weiner search warrant to review the laptop and, instead, the Midyear team “would need additional process or consent if we needed to do anything.” The Midyear SSA agreed with this assessment, stating that there was a “consensus” on

the September 29 call that the only way they would be able to review the Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop was with a new warrant.

1. Strzok Timeline

We asked Strzok about a document he subsequently created entitled “Weiner timeline” and included in an email he sent to Page on November 3, 2016. The document contained the following entries for the period from September 26 through October 21:

09/26/2016             – NYO obtains [search warrant] for Weiner laptop

09/28/2016             – ADIC NY notes potential MYE-related material following weekly SAC SVTC

09/29/2016             – Conference call between NYO and MYE team

–

NYO notes processing is crashing system and not complete, but during troubleshooting observes material potentially related to MYE (clintonemail.com and state.gov domains) seen during course of review

–

No numbers/volume available

–

Discussion about ability to search for material determines such activity would be outside scope of warrant

–

Request to NYO to gather basic facts (numbers, domains, etc) based on their review

Approx. 10/19/2016 – NYO completes carving

– NYO observes [Sensitive But Unclassified] attachment

10/21/2016             – 6:00 PM DOJ/NSD advised MYE leadership that SDNY informed them of MYE-related media on Weiner media

We asked Strzok why he created this timeline on November 3, which was days after Comey sent his letter to Congress informing it that the FBI had discovered additional emails. Strzok stated:

Because I think the, the question was, okay, here we are. We’re having to reopen and it’s right in the middle of, you know, the last week of the election. You know, potentially we would need to do this. And that people are going to come afterwards and say either you delayed to help Hillary, you delayed to help Trump, whatever it was. Let’s, while it is fresh or as fresh as possible, let’s kind of document out. And I, you know, again, I don’t know if the political hue and cry had already begun of, you know, conspiracy. But I think the sense was, okay, let’s kind of write down and while it’s still sort of fresh, yeah.

Strzok told us he could not remember if he was directed to put together the

timeline. He stated that he sent the timeline to Page for “her and Baker” and FBI executive leadership “consumption.”

As for the contents of the timeline, we asked Strzok about the September 29

entry of “[n]o numbers/volume available” and how that squared with his September 28 text message to Page that stated there were “hundreds of thousands of emails”

on the laptop. Strzok replied:

Because this is specific to the Huma Midyear stuff. I think when they gave that volume, and I don’t know what, again, I wasn’t there, my read of that text is that New York said they had in total hundreds of thousands of emails, Anthony’s, Huma’s, who-knows-who. But that the sum total were hundreds of thousands. And within that, there was more than the de minimis amount of Huma stuff. And that is a result of the conference call, they were able to say we don’t know how many we have.

We also asked Strzok about the October 19 entry and why he wrote that it was approximately October 19 when NYO had completed “carving” the laptop.170 As noted in Section 9.IV above, processing of the Weiner laptop was, in fact, completed by NYO around October 4 and the Sensitive But Unclassified attachment was observed by NYO around the same time. Strzok stated, “It was roughly that time table. And I don’t know how I arrived at the 19th, if there was a notation that clearly indicated that on or prior to that date, something had come in.”

We asked Strzok to respond to the accusation that this inaction on the Weiner laptop was a politically motivated attempt to bury information that could negatively impact the chances of Hillary Clinton in the election. Strzok responded:

No, I’d say quite the opposite…. I think every act was taken with an

objective reason to say, okay, here is why we did it, and why it was prioritized the way it was…. [The Midyear SSA] and [FBI Attorney 1] were the ones engaging with New York. You had agents and AUSAs up in New York who were involved in pursuing it, that ultimately, you know, we sat there, and we decided when we found out what was there that we needed to get the case and reopen the case. And if you want to pitch in the conspiracy perspective, everything we pushed to do, the Clinton side is going to say, what you did absolutely killed my chances at the election. So, you know, pick it. Which is your conspiracy?… [I]t angers me because there is not, if there were bias,

and there is not bias, if there were bias…it didn’t result in actions

which would be indicative of bias.

1. Concerns of Weiner Case Agent and Conversation with SDNY AUSAs on October 19

As early as October 3, the case agent assigned to the Weiner investigation expressed concern that no action appeared to be occurring with regard to the Clinton emails discovered on the Weiner laptop. He began documenting these concerns in contemporaneous emails and also discussed his concerns with his supervisor and the SDNY AUSAs assigned to the Weiner investigation. In an October 3 email, the case agent stated that a “significant number” of the emails on the Weiner laptop “appeared to be between Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton (the latter who appears to have used a number of different email addresses).” The case agent also noted in that email that he was “obviously” unable to “review any emails

170 “Data carving” is typically the last phase of processing an electronic device and involves

recovering files and data that have been either deleted or no longer contain complete metadata.

to which Anthony Weiner is not a party (such as emails between Ms. Abedin and Mrs. Clinton).” The October 3 email was serialized and inserted into the Weiner case file in Sentinel, the FBI’s case management system, on October 5.

The case agent told the OIG that no one had contacted him about the laptop

and, as the case agent, “the only person who has the authority to release that laptop’s image is me.” The case agent explained his growing concern by stating:

The crickets I was hearing was really making me uncomfortable because something was going to come crashing down…. And my understanding, which is uninformed because…I didn’t work the Hillary Clinton matter. My understanding at the time was I am telling you people I have private Hillary Clinton emails, number one, and BlackBerry messages, number two. I’m telling you that we have potentially 10 times the volume that Director Comey said we had on the record. Why isn’t anybody here? Like, if I’m the supervisor of any CI squad in Seattle and I hear about this, I’m getting on with headquarters and saying, hey, some agent working child porn here may have [Hillary Clinton] emails. Get your ass on the phone, call [the case agent], and get a copy of that drive, because that’s how you should be. And that nobody reached out to me within, like, that night, I still to this day I don’t understand what the hell went wrong.

The case agent told us that he scheduled a meeting on October 19 with the two SDNY AUSAs assigned to the Weiner investigation because he felt like he had nowhere else to turn. He described AUSA 1, the lead prosecutor, as a friend. He added, “I felt like if I went there and [AUSA 1] got the attention of Preet Bharara, maybe they’d kick some of these lazy FBI folks in the butt and get them moving.” The case agent stated that he told the AUSAs in detail about the emails he had seen between Clinton and Abedin. He continued:

And I told her, I’m a little scared here. I don’t know what to do because I’m not political. Like I don’t care who wins this election, but this is going to make us look really, really horrible. And it could ruin this case, too. And…I said the thing that also bothers me is that Comey’s testimony is inaccurate. And as a big admirer of the guy, and I think he’s a straight shooter, I wanted to, I felt like he needed to know, like, we got this. And I didn’t know if he did.

The AUSAs both told us that the case agent appeared to be very stressed and worried that somehow he would be blamed in the end if no action was taken. AUSA 1 stated that the case agent worried that the information relating to the Clinton emails had not been provided to the right people and AUSA 2 observed that the case agent “was getting, for lack of a better word, paranoid that, like, somebody was not acting appropriately, somebody was trying to bury this.”

VII. SDNY Response to Weiner Case Agent Concerns

1. SDNY Internal Discussions on October 20

On October 20, 2016, the AUSAs met with their supervisors at SDNY and informed them of their conversation with the Weiner case agent. The AUSAs stated that they told their supervisors the substantive information reported by the case agent, the case agent’s concerns that no one at the FBI had expressed interest in this information, and their concern that the case agent was stressed out and might act out in some way.

SDNY Deputy U.S. Attorney Joon Kim said that after being briefed on this issue and discussing it with U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and other supervisors in the office, SDNY leadership made the decision to call the Office of the Deputy Attorney General (ODAG) about this information. As Kim told us, “I remember our discussing it and saying, look, it’s not really our business. And, but maybe to be safe we should reach out and call.”

Bharara also recalled being briefed on the case agent’s concerns and being told that the discovery of the Clinton emails had been “reported up the chain of command at the FBI.” He stated that SDNY recognized that they had no involvement in the Clinton email server case and “wanted to stay in our lane.” Nevertheless, given the concerns and “agitation” of the case agent, Bharara said that he and the SDNY leadership team decided to contact ODAG in case “something had fallen through the cracks.”

1. SDNY Calls to ODAG and NSD on October 21

The following day, October 21, Kim reached out to ODAG about this issue. Kim told us that he was unsure about whom to call because SDNY did not know which office had handled the Clinton email server investigation. Kim called the Associate Deputy Attorney General (ADAG) who was SDNY’s primary point of contact in ODAG. Kim stated that the ADAG told him to contact DAAG George Toscas in NSD. The ADAG told us that she vaguely recalled a conversation where she put Kim and Toscas in touch with each other to discuss an issue arising out of the Weiner case. The ADAG stated that PADAG Axelrod “wanted me to make sure that SDNY and George from NSD connected directly so that whatever it was that SDNY was doing would be coordinated with whatever it was NSD was doing.” The ADAG told us that Axelrod “check[ed] in with me a number of times” to ensure Kim and Toscas had connected. At 7:08 p.m. that evening, the ADAG emailed Axelrod, “One last FYI—I also spoke with George [Toscas] earlier to give heads up and then to Joon [Kim]. They have since connected and will take it from there.” Axelrod recalled that SDNY contacted the ADAG about the presence of Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop. Axelrod told us that this call “set off alarm bells” and he wanted to make sure the information was immediately provided to Toscas and NSD.171

171 Axelrod also recalled hearing about the Weiner laptop issue at some point prior to this call. He told us that he thought SDNY had called the ADAG at an earlier point to inform ODAG that some of

Kim did not recall the specifics of his conversation with Toscas, but stated that he generally gave Toscas an overview of the Weiner investigation and told him he wanted to make sure those connected with the Clinton email server investigation were aware of the information the case agent had found. Toscas told us the information provided by Kim was much more substantive than the prior information that NSD had received from McCabe on October 3. Toscas described his call with

Kim as “the first time that I actually got information like something you could actually think through and analyze.” Toscas’s notes from the call stated:

10/21/16, 3:50 p.m.: Anthony Weiner. N.C. 15 yr-old • asked her to send video/photos. Got his laptop/phone etc. + got SW for child exploitation • FBI following normal protocol (to/from images). Although its his laptop, his wife apparently used it. 100K’s of her emails some to/from HRC.

Told [NSD Prosecutor 1] to tell Pete [Strzok] + DHL [Laufman] 10/21

4:05 p.m.

According to Toscas, his notes represent in essence the entirety of the information he received from Kim. In our interview, Toscas specifically commented on the fact that he was told by Kim that there were hundreds of thousands of Abedin’s emails on this laptop, some of which were to and from Clinton. Toscas stated that he immediately called NSD Prosecutor 1 and told him to contact Strzok and Laufman. Toscas explained that he meant Prosecutor 1 should tell them “that there’s this issue and we’re going to be getting together to talk…and get more information on it.”

At 4:04 p.m. on October 21, Kim emailed the SDNY prosecutors and leadership to inform them that he had just spoken with Toscas. AUSA 2 then called the Weiner case agent to let him know that SDNY had raised this issue with Main Justice. The case agent emailed AUSA 2 that evening, “Thanks for the call. I feel much better about it. Not to sound sappy, but I appreciate you guys understanding how uneasy I felt about the situation.” The case agent also emailed his SSA and another agent at 5:51 p.m.:

Just got a call from SDNY. [The AUSAs] understood my concerns yesterday about the nature of the stuff I have on Weiner computer (ie, that I will be scapegoated if it comes out that the FBI had this stuff). They appreciated that I was in a tight spot and spoke to their chain of command who agreed.

So they called down to DOJ, who will apparently now make a decision on what to do. This is a good thing according to SDNY because it means we (FBI C20) went above and beyond to make known that the material was of potential concern. It is out of my hands now so now I know I did the right thing by speaking up.

Abedin’s emails had been found on Weiner’s laptop. Axelrod stated that this information “didn’t trigger any alarm bells.”

SDNY probably will talk to crim management at NYO to inform them that DOJ is aware and handling. I feel much better about this now. But I wanted you to have a heads up in case [the ASAC] called you.

At 4:41 p.m. that same day, Kim called the A/SAC to inform him of the call to ODAG. The A/SAC’s notes stated, “Joon Kim – Weiner – looking at the computer

– ton of emails related to Huma that we are not looking at. SDNY reached out to DOJ and advised there are a lot of emails between Huma and Hillary and others but that we are doing nothing and have no basis to do that.” The A/SAC told us that he was “glad” that Kim had made the call, explaining that “I’ve been an agent for 21 years, so I knew that this was something I would try to get probable cause for.”

1. SDNY Memo on October 21

On October 21, the SDNY Chief Counsel began drafting a memorandum summarizing SDNY’s involvement with the issue of the Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop. Bharara told us that he instructed the Chief Counsel to write the memorandum in order to “put down, precisely, and with a hundred percent accuracy, you know, what we did, what the timeline was, and why we did what we

did.” Bharara told us that he decided to take this step because “things seemed unusual to” him and he anticipated that SDNY would be asked questions about this in the future. Kim provided a similar explanation for the memorandum, stating that

SDNY leadership “concluded at this point that we should have something in the

document, either email or memo, that laid out the chronology as, to make sure that if people did ask that, you know, we had it, we had it down on paper.”

The memorandum was dated October 21, 2016, and the Chief Counsel emailed the memorandum to the relevant SDNY personnel on October 24. We have excerpted the portions most relevant to our review below:

…[The Weiner search warrant] did not provide authority to search for evidence of any other crimes [beyond the child exploitation offenses detailed above]. We advised the [Weiner] agents of the proper scope of the search warrant and they understood the scope.

…[The case agent’s] search of emails stored on the computer apparently recovered in excess of 700,000 emails. In order to stay within the scope authorized by the warrant, [the case agent] sorted the emails recovered by sender. In performing that sort, we understand that header information for all of the emails was visible, and he noticed a very large number of emails that appear to be between Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton. [The case agent] believes that, although Weiner’s counsel provided the computer to us, the computer was used by both Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin.

We understand that the FBI agents in our case will not be reviewing the contents of the Abedin-Clinton emails because it would not be appropriate to do so under the search warrant issued in support of our child exploitation investigation. The agents, however, have reported the existence of the emails up their chain of command at FBI to enable other agents to take any action that is appropriate for their cases.

Because we understand that another component of DOJ may be conducting an investigation related to Hillary Clinton’s emails, we have advised ODAG and George Toscas at NSD, who we’re told is the most senior career prosecutor involved in investigations of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, of the existence of the emails so that they can take any steps that may be appropriate in their investigation, including, if proper, making an application for the content of potentially hundreds of thousands of emails that are outside the scope of the warrant in our case, which authorized a search only for evidence of child exploitation crimes.172

VIII. DOJ and FBI Response to SDNY Notification

As mentioned above, Toscas called Prosecutor 1 on October 21, after his phone call with Kim, and told Prosecutor 1 to notify Strzok and Laufman about the issue. Laufman stated that he could not recall the date he first heard about the Weiner laptop, but told us that he recalled Prosecutor 1 coming into his office and telling him that he had gotten a call from SDNY. Laufman said Prosecutor 1 stated that the prosecutors on the Weiner case told him that material on Weiner’s laptop “appeared on its face potentially to relate to the Clinton investigation.”

As discussed previously, until Prosecutor 1 called Strzok on October 21 to see if he was aware of the Weiner laptop issue, no one from the FBI had spoken with anyone from the Midyear prosecution team to inform them about the issue. The only contact that occurred prior to that regarding the laptop was the call previously described from McCabe to McCord on October 3.

1. Prosecutor 1-Strzok Call on October 21

At 5:41 p.m. on October 21, Prosecutor 1 sent an email to Strzok entitled “Call.” The email stated, “Pete, George Toscas called me and wanted me to pass along some information to you as soon as I could. Let me know if you have a couple of minutes to talk. I left a message on your cell. I am about to head out

and can be reached on my cell. Thanks.”

Strzok and Page exchanged the following text messages on the evening of October 21. The sender of each text message is identified after the timestamp.

6:49 p.m., Strzok: “Also, work-wise, [Prosecutor 1] called b/c Toscas now aware NY has hrc-huma emails via weiner invest. Told he [sic] we knew. Wanted to know our thoughts on getting it. George

172 After reviewing a draft of the report, Toscas asked that the OIG clarify that he was not involved in the investigation of the Clinton Foundation.

[Toscas] wanted to ensure info got to Andy [McCabe]. I told Bill

[Priestap].”

6:55 p.m., Page: “I’m sure Andy is aware, but whatever.”

Strzok told us he had a conversation at some point with either Toscas or Prosecutor 1, and thought that the conversation with Prosecutor 1 referenced in the text message was likely that conversation. Strzok told us that he had not talked about the Weiner laptop issue with Prosecutor 1 previously and he believed this was his first discussion with the Midyear prosecutors about the Weiner laptop. Strzok stated that Prosecutor 1 asked if Strzok was aware of “the potential Huma stuff up in the Weiner laptop in New York.” Strzok said that when he responded affirmatively, Prosecutor 1 asked, “And, you know, what are you doing about it, and, you know, kind of what do we need to do, and kind of the path forward on it.”

Page told us that she did not remember any of the specifics about this text message.

Prosecutor 1 stated that Toscas told him “the basic facts” about the Weiner laptop and told Prosecutor 1 to call Strzok. Prosecutor 1 stated that he did not “recall getting much detail” from Toscas. Prosecutor 1 told us that the October 21 phone call from Toscas was the first time he was informed of the potential presence of Midyear material on the Weiner laptop.

1. FBI Leadership Knowledge of SDNY Notification on October 21

We asked other FBI officials about the call by SDNY to ODAG. McCabe, Priestap, and Rybicki told us that they were unaware of the call. McCabe also said he did not recall any discussion with Page about the Weiner laptop at this time. We asked McCabe if he we was aware of the fact that the Weiner case agent had expressed concern that nothing was happening with the Clinton emails discovered on the Weiner laptop. McCabe stated that he was not aware of that and told us he

found it “disturbing.”

Comey did not recall being briefed about either the SDNY call to ODAG or NSD contacting the FBI about the Weiner laptop issue. Comey told us, though, that the fact of these communications is not something that would necessarily need to be briefed to the Director. We asked Comey—looking only at the Strzok-Page text messages excerpted above—if he found it concerning that McCabe, Priestap, Strzok, Page, Toscas, and Prosecutor 1 were all apparently aware of the presence of “hrc-huma emails” on the Weiner laptop by October 21 and no one bothered to inform him. Comey replied:

[T]he fact that who these people are doesn’t matter, but if there’s something that I found hugely significant on the 27th, if I was in a position to know that before then, then I should have been informed earlier. And like I said, honest to God I can’t remember being informed before that.

1. Toscas Asks McCabe About Weiner Laptop on October 24173

McCabe told the OIG about a passing interaction with Toscas after a morning Attorney General briefing that he had “towards the end of October.” McCabe stated:

I wouldn’t even characterize it as a discussion, but a comment, I think, that I think that George Toscas mentioned to me on the tail end of a morning AG brief, like hey, whatever, whatever happened to that thing with the laptop in New York or whatever. And I remember thinking, like, I got to, oh, I don’t know. Let me find out. I’ve got to follow up on that.

McCabe also stated:

I think he thought, like…you should ask about this. You should take a look at this thing. Like, or what, what are you guys thinking you want to do with this kind of thing was, was how he asked about it. And so he was clearly bringing it to my attention because he wanted to make sure that I was tracking it, and weighing in on it.

McCabe stated that this interaction with Toscas caused him to follow up with the team on the Weiner laptop issue and also to call Mary McCord at NSD. McCabe

stated that all of this occurred “right around the same time” and “maybe even the same day.” He stated that “this all is what compels me to talk to the Director and to tell him that we need to have a meeting about this.” We discuss McCabe’s call to McCord and his conversation with Comey in more detail below.

McCabe noted during our interview that briefings for the Attorney General were typically held three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. McCabe’s calendar contained entries for an “AG/OGA Brief” at 9.a.m. on both Monday, October 24 and Wednesday, October 26. As noted above, Kim’s call to Toscas occurred in the afternoon of Friday, October 21, and therefore after the usual time for the morning AG briefing. Also, as noted below, McCabe spoke to McCord on Tuesday, October 25. Based on this timing and McCabe’s testimony that he spoke with Toscas prior to calling McCord, we believe the conversation with Toscas occurred on Monday, October 24.174

Toscas described this interaction as “just a passing comment at the end of our [Attorney General] briefing.” Toscas stated that either he or someone else

173 The day before, Sunday, October 23, the Wall Street Journal published online its story

about McCabe’s wife and her prior run for elective office in Virginia in 2015, including donations to her

campaign by entities connected to then Governor McAuliffe. The story raised questions about McCabe’s participation in Clinton-related investigations, which we discuss in detail in Chapter Thirteen.

174 According to both Comey and McCabe’s Outlook calendars, they met at 9:30 a.m. on Monday, October 24 for a “Weekly Update.” Rybicki was also scheduled to attend this meeting. Their calendars showed that this meeting occurred immediately after the Monday morning briefing for the Attorney General where we believe Toscas and McCabe spoke. Neither Comey nor McCabe said that they recalled any discussion of the Weiner laptop at this 9:30 a.m. meeting.

asked McCabe, “[H]ey, what’s happening…what’s the next step with respect to these, you know, what we learned about the stuff on the laptop.” According to Toscas, McCabe stated that “the [Midyear] team was going to be either sent or had been sent or tasked with doing that.”

Page also told us about this interaction between McCabe and Toscas. She said that Toscas’s comment prompted McCabe to ask, “[H]ey, where are we on the Weiner stuff?” Page described this a catalyst for the Midyear team to reengage on

the issue of the Weiner laptop.

Strzok’s contemporaneous notes from October 25 included a reference to this conversation between Toscas and McCabe on October 24. The notes stated, “Toscas saw Andy: What’s the Bureau doing? DD spoke w/Mary McCord.” (Emphasis in original). We asked Strzok about these notes. Strzok stated:

[M]y recollection is that on this date, or whenever it was, at some point, Toscas runs into the Deputy and says, hey, there are, and I think this might have been, I heard there are potentially emails having to do with Clinton on the case up in New York. What are you guys doing? And then, so, and I don’t know if the, if the Deputy then spoke to Mary [McCord] about it or not. But in any event, Toscas prompting Andy, then caused Andy to ask Bill [Priestap], hey, what’s going on? Where are we with regard to that process? What are we, what do we need to do to look at it? Are you engaged, essentially? And get an update. And so Bill then brings that back down and relays that to me.

McCabe described himself as “concerned” when the Weiner laptop came to his attention again and said that he asked the team to explain why he had not been updated. McCabe stated:

Ultimately, when I got the feedback on the status, what I was told was that when the team went up the first time because of their legal limitations they, they really weren’t able to dig into the thing, to make an assessment of what was there. And so therefore they couldn’t recommend to us what we should do with it. And so that some, they had to go back to the district, either get a new search warrant or modify the previous search warrant, and that’s essentially what had taken place over the intervening time.

McCabe said he would have expected the team to report this information to him directly rather than getting asked about it by Department personnel. We asked McCabe who was responsible for following up on the Weiner laptop. McCabe told us

his understanding was that Strzok “was actually doing it” and Priestap would have

had an oversight role. In fact, as discussed previously, nobody on the FBI Midyear team had taken any steps to follow up on the laptop, including steps to obtain legal authority to review its contents, after they learned about it in late September.

1. Call between McCabe, Sweeney, and NYO Criminal SAC on October 24

NYO ADIC Sweeney’s Outlook calendar contained the following entry for October 24: “7:30 pm-7:45 pm Telcal w/DD and [the incoming NYO Criminal SAC].” At the time of the call, the SAC was transitioning from an FBI job in Washington, D.C. to the Criminal SAC job in NYO. Although not reflected in his calendar entry, Sweeney told us he was “pretty sure” that during this call he mentioned to McCabe that SDNY had called Main Justice about the Weiner matter. Sweeney stated that he did not recall McCabe’s response to this information.

The SAC told us that Sweeney called him at some point during the week of October 24 while McCabe was giving him a ride home. The SAC told us that he almost immediately put Sweeney on speaker phone and the three discussed several topics. The SAC continued, “I don’t remember specifics. But I do remember talking about, it did come up regarding the Weiner laptop.” The SAC stated that he also believed that it “wasn’t a first impression,” meaning it did not seem like the first time Sweeney and McCabe had discussed the Weiner laptop.

McCabe told us that he had no recollection of this phone call.

1. Reengagement of FBI Headquarters and the Midyear Team on the Weiner Laptop

Beginning on October 25, both McCabe and the FBI Midyear team took a renewed interest in the issue of the Weiner laptop. We discuss this renewed interest below, including conversations by McCabe with both the Department and Comey about the laptop, and reengagement by the Midyear team.

1. McCabe Phone Call with McCord on October 25

McCabe and McCord both told us that they discussed the Weiner laptop in a phone call in late October, though neither could recall the specific date. McCord provided contemporaneous notes from the call, but they were undated. Page also provided notes that referenced this call and her notes suggest the conversation occurred on October 25. Given the timeline of other events, we believe October 25 is the date on which this conversation occurred.

McCabe stated that he wanted to update McCord on the status of the Weiner laptop and tell her that “we have a problem here that we need to deal with.” McCabe said he thought that he would have asked McCord about “scope of the warrant issues,” although he told us he did not remember many details about the conversation.

Page’s contemporaneous notes from October 25 included McCord’s name and phone number, and stated: “Anthony Weiner — ADIC NY – where are we on this?

• Not sure we can legally look at the material — Mary McCord needs to will find out where it is, status of the request.”

McCord stated that McCabe told her that NYO had found “many hundreds of thousands of emails from Huma Abedin to Secretary Clinton” on the laptop. According to McCord, McCabe stated that the Midyear team had planned to review, but SDNY told them to hold off while they examined the legality of doing that under the Weiner search warrant. McCord’s notes from the phone call included entries that stated, “mid-year team to try to determine if duplicative or new” and “Spoke to Sweeney last night.” McCord told us that the entry about Sweeney referred to a conversation McCabe stated that he had with Sweeney the prior night.

McCord told us that she spoke with Toscas after the call with McCabe. According to McCord, Toscas stated that “SDNY had not shopped a search warrant on the laptop” and that the Midyear team was “getting together tomorrow to decide whether they want to search it and if they have probable cause to get a warrant.” Toscas told us that he did not recall a conversation between McCabe and McCord, but added that “it seems like something that would be in the ordinary course of what happened and would not stand out to me.” We also showed McCord’s notes to Toscas. Toscas commented that he did not know what the word “shopped” could mean in this context.

1. Comey, McCabe, and Sweeney Discuss the Weiner Laptop on October 25

On October 25 from 2:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., numerous FBI executives participated in one of Director Comey’s Quarterly Strategy Review sessions. According to Sweeney, who participated in the session by phone, at the conclusion of the discussions, McCabe asked him to stay on the line. Sweeney told us that only he, McCabe, and Comey remained.175

Sweeney’s notes from the October 25 discussion stated:

4:15 to 4:30 p.m. – SVTC – Short discussion w/D/DD/ADD following main SVTC re: [Clinton Foundation] matter. Follow-up following Strategy Briefing. Brief update re: Weiner investigation; overt legal process and ability to get fed SW for computer. DD – need to move forward and request action consistent with DOJ guidelines/election.

Sweeney described the discussion:

And then when the room clears, [McCabe] starts talking about the Weiner laptop…. [I]t goes into an explanation of who Weiner is, Huma Abedin’s husband. She’s the chief of staff. This is how these emails would likely be there. And that gets into a conversation about authority, like we can’t look at this stuff, and we’re not doing.

According to Sweeney, the conversation then turned to the NYO Clinton Foundation investigation.

175 Sweeney told us that he did not recall Bowdich participating in this discussion despite the “ADD” notation in his calendar. Bowdich likewise told us he did not recall this discussion.

Sweeney stated that he did not remember McCabe going into detail about what had been discovered. For example, Sweeney said that he did not recall McCabe providing the total number of emails on the laptop, although Sweeney stated McCabe may have mentioned that a large volume of emails had been discovered. According to Sweeney, McCabe stated that the Midyear team was “going to look at” the laptop and “get a search warrant.” We asked Sweeney about Comey’s reaction to the discussion of the Weiner laptop. Sweeney described Comey as “just absorbing the information.”

That evening, according to Sweeney’s notes, he made calls to the NYO A/SAC, incoming NYO Criminal SAC, the Criminal Investigative Division AD, and Rybicki. The notes also included an entry for a follow-up call to McCabe. Each of these entries noted a discussion related to Sweeney’s earlier call with Comey and McCabe and the Clinton Foundation investigation. The entries for the calls with Rybicki and the Criminal Investigative Division AD also mentioned the Weiner investigation.

McCabe told us that he did not recall the discussion with Comey and Sweeney about the Weiner laptop and Clinton Foundation investigation. With regard to the Weiner laptop discussion, McCabe stated, “[T]he only conversation I recollect with the Director, it probably took place on the 26th, was telling him you need to have a meeting on this tomorrow. And as I said before, I remember that as being a one-on-one in his office.” Comey said that he did not recall the discussion with McCabe and Sweeney about the Weiner laptop and Clinton Foundation.

1. Midyear Team Emails on October 25

Strzok and FBI Attorney 1 exchanged the followings emails on October 25.

The subject line of the email was “Weiner Material” and the sender of each email is

identified after the timestamp.

2:55 p.m., Strzok: “Sorry to bother you, DoJ called [McCabe] looking for status of our potential review of the huma-hrc emails. Where/with who is that decision now? What would we need to do to get a decision? Thanks, Pete”.

3:31 p.m., FBI Attorney 1: “Is this the NY search warrant issue? We were waiting for NYO to get back to us about the volume of Huma

related emails on the devices.”

3:35 p.m., Strzok: “Yes. I thought they said thousands? But I have no idea who I heard that from. Who at NYO is supposed to tell us?”

3:38 p.m., FBI Attorney 1: “I’miss [sic] not sure. [The Midyear SSA] was working with the NYO SSA. Thousands? I hadn’t heard any numbers.”

3:45 p.m., Strzok: “OK I’ll ask [the Midyear SSA]”.

This exchange is immediately followed by an email exchange between Strzok, FBI Attorney 1, and the Midyear SSA entitled “Weiner emails.” Again, the sender of each email is identified after the timestamp.

3:47 p.m., Strzok: “[H]ave you gotten an idea how many Huma-HRC emails are in the Weiner stuff? Has popped up on people’s radars again”.

4:34 p.m., Midyear SSA: “NY did not have an estimate of the number of emails during our lync call on 9/29/2016. I have not heard back from NY but can contact [the A/SAC] or ASAC…if needed for an update. [FBI Attorney 1] – do you know the status of the SW and whether we can review the emails?”

4:58 p.m., FBI Attorney 1: “They never did send me the actual SW, but based on they’re [sic] representations, we won’t be able to review the emails without additional process or consent.”

5:00 p.m., Strzok: “Yes please contact NY for #s. Thanks”.

We asked Strzok, FBI Attorney 1, and the SSA about this exchange. We told Strzok that this exchange suggested that nothing had happened since the September 29 call. Strzok replied, “That’s right. That’s my assumption I believe. Yep.” FBI Attorney 1 stated that Strzok’s email was the first time she recalled hearing about the Weiner laptop issue since September 29. The Midyear SSA agreed that this was probably his first contact about the issue since September 29.

We asked Strzok whether any action would have occurred without the Department notification to McCabe. Strzok stated:

Probably not. I mean, at some point, yes. At some point, there would have been a, God, what happened to that follow-up…. [T]his caused that to happen. There certainly would have been action. Whether that was the 25th or November 8th, or whenever, I’m not sure when that would have occurred.

However, Strzok emphasized that, at this point, there “was no indication on anybody’s radar that this was going to result in a notification to Congress.” Instead, Strzok stated that this was something the Midyear team would have to pursue, but he did not think it had any relevance to the election.

The Midyear SSA told us that the reason this was “coming on people’s radar again” was because NYO “was saying, hey, once again, we’ve got this stuff. What do you want us to do with it?” The Midyear SSA stated that he reached out to NYO after receiving this email. He recalled that “New York was somewhat frustrated.”

1. Events Leading to the Decision to Seek a Search Warrant

In this section, we discuss the meetings, discussions, and emails that preceded the October 27 briefing where Comey authorized the Midyear team to seek a search warrant for the Weiner laptop.

1. Midyear-NYO-SDNY Call on October 26

At 2:30 p.m. on October 26, Midyear FBI personnel, Midyear prosecutors, NYO, and SDNY participated in a conference call about the Weiner laptop. The highest ranking participants for each group on the call were Strzok, Toscas, the NYO A/SAC, and Kim.

The NYO A/SAC, ASAC, SSA, and Weiner case agent all participated in the call. This was the first time that the Weiner case agent had spoken directly with anyone associated with the Midyear investigation. The case agent told us that he felt he was asked questions about information that he had already reported up the chain of command in September. He stated:

They were asking questions that I had already repeatedly answered in other calls. In other words, people were asking what domains are you seeing? How many emails are you seeing? What do you think you’re seeing? Who are they to, who are they from? What are the domains? Oh, we have that domain? What years? Like, questions that we, I had been asked and either had answered preliminarily, and then we became uncomfortable legally searching for those answers. But these were things that were known to me and had been made known above me for weeks.

The Weiner case agent stated that “the only thing that was new” was that others on the call asked him to speculate on what he had seen. According to the case agent,

he stated, “Based on the number of emails, we could have every email that Huma and Hillary ever sent each other. It’s possible, given the pure volume, it’s possible.”

The NYO SSA described the call as “just basically discussions and information about…potentially what…was there, which we still didn’t know because we hadn’t looked at anything.” The A/SAC thought the call was “matter-of-fact” and said it was the first time they were questioned by an NSD lawyer. According to the A/SAC’s notes, NYO briefed that there were 675,000 emails on the laptop spanning a time period from 2006 to 2016, and stated that there “appears to be blackberry messages” on the laptop.

The FBI’s Midyear team told us that they learned important new information on the call.176 Strzok described it as “the triggering event” and FBI Attorney 1 stated that this was the “call where it was crystallized to me what was on the laptop.” Strzok, FBI Attorney 1, and the Lead Analyst each cited two important pieces of information provided by NYO on the call.177 First, the presence of a large

176 Except for the September 29 call with NYO, the Midyear case agents and analysts had limited knowledge of and involvement with the Weiner laptop until after Comey’s October 28 letter to Congress. Our references to the “FBI Midyear team” in this Chapter generally refer to the leadership of the team, including Strzok, the Midyear SSA, and FBI Attorney 1.

177 In comments provided to the OIG after reviewing a draft of this report, the Lead Analyst stated that he believed the October 26 call “was the first time [he] had ever personally heard the details related to the” Weiner laptop.

volume of emails on the Weiner laptop, particularly the potential for a large number of @clintonemail.com emails. Second, the indication that the “missing emails,” meaning emails from Clinton’s first three months as Secretary of State, could be present on the laptop. Strzok explained that this was the most important factor and he did not believe that the Midyear team knew about the potential presence of the BlackBerry data earlier. Strzok added, “We need[ed] to try and get this because this is, potentially would alter, would change our understanding of the investigative conclusions that we arrived at in July.”

We asked Strzok what he was specifically told about the BlackBerry backups and if he thought these might be Blackberry backups for Clinton. Strzok stated:

[I]t wasn’t Clinton’s backups. It was the sense that it was Huma’s backups, and that Huma was frequently used, my recollection, as kind of a proxy for the, for Secretary Clinton. So if people wanted to get something to Clinton, they’d email it to Huma and say please print for the Secretary. And she would, she was a gatekeeper in that way. And, you know, would print it out and then take it to the Secretary.

I don’t, my recollection is that we certainly saw the domain. And that, the domain, because I think it was, and again, I’m, if I’m wrong forgive me. Att.Blackberry.net I think was that domain they used for the first three months, and we saw that on there. I don’t know if we had the granularity of detail to say Huma’s account on that domain in that time frame. I don’t know if we had that granularity. But I do know we had, I think, that domain in the span, coupling with the kind of overall volume that we thought there was a reasonable likelihood that, that it would be in there.

When asked how this information differed from the information presented on the September 29 call, Strzok, who did not participate in the September 29 call, stated that his understanding from the Midyear SSA and FBI Attorney 1, who were on that call, was that NYO did not have “the numbers” or “the volume of domains.” Strzok said that he also thought that NYO had only provided preliminary data on the September call and “they weren’t quite sure what they had yet.” Strzok added that he knew NYO “couldn’t review it because it was outside the scope of their warrant.”

FBI Attorney 1 told us, “I don’t…even think they discussed any of that stuff [on the September 29 call]. They certainly said there was some clintonemail.com, but again, like I said, that we were finding, people had clintonemail.com emails all over the place. There was nothing with this sort of certainty that this is what was on there.” The Midyear SSA stated that NYO provided “numbers” on this call, which he believed had not been provided previously.

Page told us that as a result of the conference call “we now understand that

the Huma emails are of a volume that it could be meaningful and that there could be meaningfully new evidence that we have not previously seen in other materials

we had reviewed.” She added that the “volume of emails” coupled with the presence of a “BlackBerry backup” were the two most important new facts that came out of this call. Page’s notes from the call were entitled “Good news, in a bad news way (MYE).” She explained this heading by stating:

[M]y good news in a bad news way is a reflection of like, well, more evidence is always good news. It might either change our decision or outcome or further substantiate the outcome we reached. In a bad news way because, like, I cannot believe we are, we are here. We are doing this again on October 26th. Like, oh, my goodness.

FBI Attorney 1 told us that the decision to obtain a search warrant was made either on the call or shortly after it. FBI Attorney 1 noted that Toscas was on the call and “seemed to be on board” with the idea that the Midyear team needed to get the Weiner laptop. FBI Attorney 1 added that she was “surprised” that the Department left the call “talking about getting a search warrant.” She explained that she was surprised because it “definitely was…more aggressive than they had been before,” but thought this may have been due to “the time pressure.”

Prosecutor 2 told us that this call was when she first learned about the Weiner laptop. Prosecutor 2 stated that the prosecutors asked numerous questions to NYO and SDNY personnel “to try to figure out what they knew about the emails and, and about the devices, so we knew what the scope of like what we could look at.” Toscas stated that the information he learned in late October about the Weiner laptop, including information provided on this call, was markedly different than what he had been told McCabe had informed NSD about in early October. Toscas described the information provided earlier in October as “totally off base” and he told us that he attributed this discrepancy to a “garble,” or miscommunication.

1. Briefing of McCabe on October 26

Page told us that the team briefed McCabe about the information from the conference call on the evening of October 26. Page stated that McCabe indicated that “we’re going to need to reopen. This, this is significant. Or we’re going to need to at least seek a search warrant to sort of look at this material.” Page stated, “We informed the Deputy Director, and he says, yeah, we’ve got to get this in front of the Director tomorrow. And so that gets scheduled for the next day…[to] tell him what we found and what the team thinks, which is certainly we need to go get a warrant for this information.” On the morning of October 27, at

6:10 a.m., Baker sent Page an email entitled “Follow up” and asked her if she had talked to McCabe yet and whether “[McCabe] talked to [Comey]?” Page replied at

6:19 a.m., stating, “Yes I did talk to Andy, but he did not connect with [Comey]. Andy sent him an email this morning asking that he get a briefing from the MYE

team.” We describe McCabe’s email and the events of October 27 below.

Strzok said that he thought that he and possibly the Lead Analyst and FBI Attorney 1 briefed McCabe after the conference call. Strzok stated that he explained the scope of what NYO possessed, why that was important, and why the Midyear team thought they should review the material. FBI Attorney 1 said that

she recalled briefing “the executives” about what they had learned on the conference call and the need to “look into this” using process.

Priestap told us that he did not recall this briefing with McCabe, but stated that he would normally be present for such a briefing. Priestap stated, “Very rarely would my team be there if I wasn’t there.”

McCabe told us that he could not recall who informed him of the substance of the conference call with SDNY and NYO, but stated it would have been some combination of Strzok, Priestap, the Lead Analyst, Page, and FBI Attorney 1. When asked what he was told, McCabe stated:

The only thing I remember is like we had at that point confirmed that, yes, there is no doubt what appears to be relevant email for us on this laptop. So the question then becomes like do we go full-bore into another round of exploitation along the lines of what we had already done in Midyear? How do we handle this thing? And then the implications of like notification and, and everything that they ended up struggling with the next day.

McCabe said that he did not recall any mention of seeing domains or emails associated with a BlackBerry device. We asked McCabe what was relayed that was not known in late September. McCabe replied:

I think they had looked a little bit deeper than just the tos and froms and could actually say, like, you know, I seem to remember in the kind of legally restricted view it was just kind of a snapshot having looking, you know, at stuff and then determined they couldn’t look further. That’s how they had a sense of what was there. Now, at this point, we had done some sort of more extensive review to say, okay, yeah, it’s like this number between these people, that sort of thing.

McCabe stated that he could not remember who had conducted this “more extensive review” and “was surprised” to learn that no one from the Midyear team

reviewed the laptop until October 30. McCabe told us that he assumed someone on the Midyear team had reviewed the laptop “[b]ecause that’s what I initially asked for.” We asked McCabe if the fact that no one from Midyear had reviewed the laptop was an important fact that the team should have been brought to his attention. McCabe stated:

I know that I asked them to go up there and look at it. And they had a…SVTC with the team I think the following day. I think at some point I learned that they had a SVTC early on in this. In this process rather than traveling up there. But I certainly expected that our folks would be in New York looking at what we had on that laptop.

We asked McCabe why this issue was coming back to the forefront on

October 26 instead of sometime earlier. McCabe stated that it was “[b]ecause I started asking questions about it probably.” We also asked McCabe what would have occurred if SDNY had not contacted ODAG and Toscas had not mentioned the

Weiner laptop to McCabe after the morning briefing. McCabe said he could not speculate on what would have happened if the facts were different, but stated that

“it certainly is a good thing that George Toscas brought it to my attention.” McCabe added, “Is it something that I should have been getting briefed upon as the month went on? Absolutely.” McCabe told us that he had no idea why the topic of the Weiner laptop “wasn’t making its way into the agenda for those regular meetings and interactions with [Page], [Strzok], Steinbach, the Director.”

We also asked Baker why the Weiner laptop issue reemerged at this time. Baker stated:

[M]y understanding, it was simply that senior managers thought that they had delegated this to the right people and that the issue was being worked. And that they would come back with a proposal about what to do, and that we took the, took our collective eyes off the ball, didn’t pay attention to it, and when it came back and we were informed that it was not resolved, then it became a crisis. That’s the best I can reconstruct for you.

1. McCabe Recollection of Discussion with Comey on October 26

McCabe told us that he remembered mentioning the issue of the Weiner laptop to Comey twice. The first, as we described previously, McCabe stated was shortly after he learned of the laptop in late September. The second time McCabe stated was toward “the end of October”—McCabe estimated it was on October 26— when he sat down with Comey “one-on-one” in Comey’s office. McCabe stated:

I told him we need to have a meeting on this because now we have some, you know, some clarity on, on what’s in this laptop. I specifically remember telling him, this is about that laptop we discussed a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know if he remembered it.

McCabe stated that he did not remember Comey asking him about the Weiner laptop during the period between the two meetings. McCabe told us that he believed that second meeting with Comey “was truly the second time that we discussed it.”

We asked McCabe to describe Comey’s reaction to this second conversation about the Weiner laptop. McCabe stated:

The best of my recollection it was just kind of an acknowledgement that, like, this was a very complicated issue that had a lot of problematic, you know, kind of downstream, there are all kinds of decision and issues that were related to this. It would be complicated and, and we need to figure it out.

McCabe said that he did not recall Comey mentioning the issue of congressional notification during this conversation.

As mentioned earlier, Comey told us that he dimly recalled being informed

about the Weiner laptop in the “beginning of October.” Comey stated that he did

not remember hearing of the Weiner laptop again until McCabe emailed him on the morning of October 27.

1. McCabe Email to Comey on October 27

On October 27, at 5:20 a.m., McCabe sent an email to Comey entitled “MYR.” Rybicki, Bowdich, and Page were cc’d on the email. It stated, “Boss, The MYR team has come across some additional actions they believe they need to take. I think we should probably gather today to discuss implications if you have any space on your calendar. I am happy to join by phone. Will push to Lisa and Jim to coordinate if you are good.” At 7:13 a.m., Comey responded, “Copy.”

McCabe told us that he felt the situation was “absolutely urgent” and that is why he proposed an October 27 meeting with Comey even though McCabe knew he would be out of town that day. When asked why it was urgent, McCabe stated that the situation was urgent because “it’s been sitting around for three weeks,” “it’s important,” and “it’s getting closer to” the election. We questioned McCabe about the tone of the email, pointing out that phrases such as “we should probably gather today” and “if you have any space on your calendar” did not suggest urgency. McCabe disagreed, stating, “I mean, by me saying I think we should probably gather today, that’s me saying this can’t wait until tomorrow.” McCabe told us that he assumed his second conversation with Comey, which he estimated was on October 26, “predated this email” and the email was simply the notification to Comey to set up the meeting.

We also asked Comey about the tone of McCabe’s email and whether the phrasing suggested a lack of urgency. Comey replied:

No, I didn’t take it that way since he’s emailing me at 5:20 a.m. I mean I took this, and the reason I remember it that way is, you don’t send the Director a dawn email about it would be nice to get together to talk about how we’re going to celebrate Arbor Day. I mean this is, the Midyear team has come across some additional actions they believe they need to take. And so I took it as, I believe what it intended is, we need to speak to you.

We asked Comey if knew what this email was about when he received it. He stated:

I don’t think so. I don’t remember—when I got this, I don’t remember, because my recollection is as I told you, is walking into the conference room with this grin on my face because they’re all sitting in the same seats and sitting down and saying something like the band is back together, what’s going on? And seeing these sort of dark faces, so I don’t—at least to my recollection, this is the first time that this dawn email from Andy is we need to speak to you because the Midyear team has some additional actions they need to take and it didn’t, I don’t remember this resonating context, resonating from this like, okay, let’s do it.

Comey also told us that he did not initially recall that he had been previously notified about the Weiner laptop. He explained:

October 27th, Andy…sent me an email early in the morning saying that the Midyear Team needs to meet with you today. And I responded, of course. And I actually don’t—I’ve thought about it since, I remember now, but I didn’t focus on it at the time. I was aware sometime in the first week or two of October that there was a laptop that a criminal squad had seized from Anthony Weiner in New York and someone said to me…kind of in passing, they’re trying to figure out whether it has any connection to the Midyear investigation…. And it’s funny, when I was first reminded, I didn’t even remember—by my staff saying, remember this is the laptop they mentioned to you. And I said, I don’t remember being told about a laptop, but it definitely was sometime in early October.

1. Midyear Team Communications Preceding Comey Briefing on October 27

On October 27, at 6:49 a.m., Page sent an email entitled “MYE” to Bowdich, Rybicki, Baker, Anderson, FBI Attorney 1, Strzok, the Lead Analyst, Priestap, McCabe, and Comey’s administrative assistant. The email stated, “Team, The Deputy has asked that we convene today to inform the Director about what we know regarding the laptop in NY. Time is TBD, but I just wanted to alert you all now.”

Strzok sent an email to the Lead Analyst a few minutes later about the briefing, stating, “I’ve got this. Will grab you and run down brief. Promise to make at least one sponsorship plug for William and Mary and one gratuitous yuck yuck joke about de-duping or getting the band back together.” We asked Strzok about the tone of the email and his state of mind at the time. Strzok stated that it was a “here we go again” moment, meaning that he was thinking that “we’ve got to get the team back together and make sure all the systems are set up and figure out how we’re going to get CART to do it.” Strzok added that he was not thinking about a letter to Congress at this point. Strzok told us that the first time the issue of congressional notification came up is during the briefing with Comey.

At 6:55 a.m., Strzok sent an email to the Midyear SSA and FBI Attorney 1 asking “Would you please find out when NY got the [Weiner] laptop?” and to provide “a rough date [for] when you initially talked to them about their warrant.” FBI Attorney 1 responded:

[The Midyear SSA] and I had a conference call with NYO on Sept 29. I believe they got the devices several days prior to that, but I’m sure [the Midyear SSA] can find the exact date. At the time of the call, due to the volume, the system doing the imaging had just crashed so they thought it would take into the next week to find out any specifics about the volume or email domains. We also discussed the fact that we received this via SW, not consent, so we really couldn’t look at the other emails without additional process or consent. But we wanted to find out more about what was on the device before deciding what to do next….

1. Comey Briefing on October 27

At 10:00 a.m. on October 27, the Midyear team briefed Comey on what NYO had discovered on the Weiner laptop. The following individuals were present for the briefing: Comey, Rybicki, Bowdich, Baker, Steinbach, Priestap, Strzok, Anderson, Page, FBI Attorney 1, and the Lead Analyst. McCabe was out of the office on October 27, but phoned in at the start of the briefing. However, shortly after phoning in, Comey asked McCabe to “drop off” the call, stating, “I don’t need you on this call.” Comey told us that he asked McCabe to leave the call because of the Wall Street Journal article on October 23 about then Governor McAuliffe’s contributions to McCabe’s wife’s campaign in 2015. (The circumstances leading up to Comey’s decision to exclude McCabe from this call and ultimately to McCabe’s recusal are discussed in detail in Chapter Thirteen of this report.) Comey told us that from that point forward McCabe had no involvement in the Midyear investigation. Page also left the meeting once Comey asked McCabe to “drop off” the call.

Comey stated that he was told during the briefing:

[T]hat the criminal squad had gotten this laptop from—through a search warrant in New York. They had obtained it in some odd way from like Anthony Weiner’s lawyers or something, but it came from Anthony Weiner who had been married to Huma Abedin for a number of years. And that the criminal squad had a search warrant, the scope of which they obviously were going to abide carefully, but that they had alerted—sometime in the previous couple of weeks, they had alerted the Midyear team that from the metadata they could see, there may be materials that the Midyear team would want to look at. And then they told me they had engaged in some sort of process where they got—I don’t know what it was, but somehow technically they got the stuff transferred down here and figured out how they could—what they could look at properly without a warrant and had been able to look at an image of that computer and what they saw led them to believe that they needed to go get a search warrant.

And I said, well tell me what you see. And they said, we see evidence of many, many, many, thousands and thousands of emails from the period of Secretary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State that—I forget how they said it, but basically that involved the Clinton email address domain. And they said that’s one. Two, we see Verizon.Blackberry.net email metadata. We don’t know what the content is, from the period of time when Secretary Clinton was using a Blackberry, Verizon.Blackberry.net account at the beginning of her tenure as Secretary of State. And I remember them telling me this specifically, we think this may be the missing three months of emails. And as we talked about earlier, the reason that would be so important is that could be germane to an evaluation of her intent which is a central part of our investigation. They said we think we may have found the missing emails. We see thousands and thousands of others and so we’re highly confident that there are Secretary Clinton emails on there. Logic tells us that there will be classified emails on there because even if it’s a dup[licate] of what she had elsewhere, those classified emails would be there and we think it may be the missing emails and so we have—we feel compelled to go get a search warrant.

Comey reiterated that “the volume of emails” and the presence of the BlackBerry emails were “two highly significant facts” and that the presence of the BlackBerry emails in particular “weighed very heavily on me.”

Comey told us that the decision to authorize the Midyear team to seek a

search warrant for the Weiner laptop “was an easy decision” and that there was no

controversy over this decision. He noted that the Department agreed with the decision to seek the search warrant. Comey stated that “the harder decision [was] going to be what obligation do we have in the wake of that.” We describe these discussions, which led to the October 28 letter to Congress, in more detail in Chapter Ten.

Others present for the briefing provided a similar account. Priestap told us that he recalled Comey asking if the Midyear team needed to review the Weiner

laptop to be satisfied that they have “turned over the necessary stones” and “be comfortable with the decision we made.” Priestap continued:

And I remember telling him, yes. We don’t know with certainty what’s in there. It could be information that we’ve not seen, you know, thus far, and so yes…in effect it’s dereliction of duty to not, you know this thing is out here to pass it over. So yes, we’ve got to, we have to do it.

Strzok stated that Comey agreed “fairly quickly” with the team’s suggestion to seek a search warrant. Strzok continued, “And then it very quickly turns to a, okay, so

do we need to tell Congress? And that, I think, in my mind, my recollection the first time that kind of comes up….”

Anderson told us that Comey asked Strzok and the Lead Analyst:

[I]f we ignore this pool of material, you know, can we still stand behind the assertion that we’ve done everything that, that, that we should have done? And the answer that, you know, that Pete and [the Lead Analyst] gave…these are not quotes or anything like that. But this is sort of like generally the sense, was that, no, we have to pursue this material, because, you know, we, we would do it in any other case. And it is, you know, a pool of evidence that hypothetically, now understandably it’s very speculative, but there is that possibility that it could change our outcome, because of that, you know, that possibility that it could contain something about intent.

Strzok also cited the missing emails, stating that if data from “that first three months” was present on the laptop it could be “substantively different from what we have recovered” to date.

Priestap provided a different perspective on the potential impact of the material on the Weiner laptop. He told us that he thought the review of the Weiner

laptop was necessary even though he “would have been shocked” if they found

anything on the laptop that changed the outcome of the Midyear investigation. Priestap explained:

I felt that we had reviewed so much stuff that even if this was all stuff we hadn’t reviewed, the chances that it was going to be some smoking gun in this subset of communications that didn’t come up in all of this other stuff, again, would have been, would have shocked me. Could it have been possible? Absolutely. That’s why we had to review it. But again, we had just done so much work and learned and seen so much else that to think there is going to be a sliver of, you know, information on nefarious activity that we weren’t seeing other places, I, I just doubt it.

1. Analysis
2. Failure of the FBI to Take Earlier Action on the Weiner Laptop

In this section we analyze the failure of the FBI to take any significant action to obtain access to the contents of the Weiner laptop for purposes of the Midyear investigation between late September, when NYO communicated the essential facts about the laptop to the Midyear team, and late October, when the FBI finally obtained a search warrant and began the accelerated process of analyzing the laptop’s contents. As detailed below, we found most of the explanations offered for this delay to be unconvincing. Faster action could and should have been taken to review the laptop’s emails.

By no later than September 29, the FBI had learned virtually every fact that was cited by the FBI in late October as justification for obtaining the search warrant for the Weiner laptop, including that the laptop contained:

• Over 340,000 emails, some of which were from domains associated with Clinton, including state.gov, clintonfoundation.org, clintonemail.com, and hillaryclinton.com;
• Numerous emails between Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin;
• An unknown number of BlackBerry communications on the laptop, including one or more messages between Abedin and Clinton, indicating the possibility that the laptop contained communications from the early months of Clinton’s tenure;178 and
• Emails dated beginning in 2007 and covering the entire period of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State.

Much if not all of this information was communicated to FBI Headquarters and to the FBI Midyear team before the end of September. NYO ADIC Sweeney described facts about the laptop to senior headquarters personnel on a September 28 video teleconference. Testimony and documents show that Sweeney also briefed McCabe, Coleman, Steinbach, and Priestap individually on September 28. Of equal significance, NYO briefed the FBI Midyear team about the Weiner laptop in another conference call on September 29, including providing information that NYO lacked legal authority to review emails between Abedin and former Secretary Clinton under the existing search warrant. Witness interviews and contemporaneous notes show that most or all of the above information was known to the FBI Midyear team by late September.

The explanations given to the OIG for the FBI’s failure to take immediate action on the Weiner laptop fell into four general categories:

1.

The FBI Midyear team was waiting for additional information about the contents of the laptop from NYO, which was not provided until late October.

2.

The FBI Midyear team could not review the emails without additional legal authority, such as consent or a new search warrant.

3.

The FBI Midyear team and senior FBI officials did not believe that the

information on the laptop was likely to be significant.

4.

Key members of the FBI Midyear team had been reassigned to the investigation of Russian interference in the U.S. election, which was a higher priority.

We examine each of these explanations in turn below.

The FBI Midyear Team was awaiting further information from NYO: Several members of the Midyear team offered this explanation, which we found unpersuasive. To begin with, all participants in the September 29 conference call knew that no one in the FBI could examine the contents of the emails of interest to the Midyear investigation without first obtaining either consent or a new search warrant, because the scope of the existing search warrant issued in the Anthony Weiner investigation was strictly limited. In addition, Sweeney informed Priestap of this fact on September 29. Although NYO was still processing the laptop as of

178 Although Comey identified this fact as critical to his assessment of the potential significance of the emails on the Weiner laptop, the information was not included in the October 30 search warrant application for the Weiner laptop.

September 29, the completion of this task would not eliminate the need to obtain proper search authority. It was up to the Midyear team and the NSD prosecutors to obtain authority to review the emails, not NYO or SDNY. Yet the FBI Midyear team took no action to inform the prosecutors about the laptop or to obtain authority to search it.179

Even if the FBI Midyear team somehow misapprehended the intentions and ability of NYO to provide more information about the emails, no one from the Midyear team followed up when NYO provided no update in the weeks following the September 29 call. Had the Midyear team inquired, they would have learned that NYO completed processing the laptop by around October 4, but was taking no further actions to review any information, including emails, unrelated to the Weiner child exploitation investigation—a fact that had previously been briefed to the FBI Midyear team.

The FBI Midyear Team needed legal authority to review the emails: This explanation for the absence of action, which was given by several witnesses, is illogical. As described above, the lack of legal authority to search the laptop related to the investigative interests of the FBI Midyear team, not to those of the NYO Weiner team. Thus, the factual information necessary to establish probable cause to obtain a search warrant for the information that the Midyear team was seeking resided with the FBI Midyear team, not the NYO Weiner investigation team. Moreover, this lack of authority to review emails between Abedin and former Secretary Clinton was known to the FBI Midyear team by September 29. If anything, this explanation should have served as a rationale for the FBI Midyear team to take affirmative steps to obtain a new search warrant that provided them with authority to review the emails between Abedin and Clinton on the Weiner laptop. Instead, the FBI Midyear team took no action at all to solve this problem. Indeed, they did not even tell the Midyear prosecutors, who would have to be involved in any search warrant application process (as they were in late October), about the NYO discovery on the laptop.

The FBI Midyear Team did not believe the laptop evidence was likely to be significant: Strzok described his view of the Weiner laptop in late September as simply “a lead that likely is going to result in some investigation.” Strzok stated that the suggestion that the matter should have been treated with more urgency was “misplaced” because “[w]e did not know what was there.” He stated the team would have reviewed the emails at some point, perhaps in January or February 2017. Page also told us that the emails were not yet considered significant at that time because “emails had been found lots of other places that ultimately weren’t worth pursuing lots of other times.” Priestap similarly stated

179 We found that McCabe called NSD Principal DAAG McCord on October 3 and flagged the issue of emails in an iCloud account shared by Abedin and Weiner. However, McCord told us, and her contemporaneous notes indicated, that McCabe provided minimal information about this issue, and did not mention the potential presence of emails between Abedin and Clinton on Weiner’s laptop. We identified no other FBI Headquarters or Midyear personnel communications with the Department about the Weiner investigation—and no communications about the presence of Midyear-related emails on the Weiner laptop—until October 21.

that he did not expect any new information discovered on the laptop to “change the outcome of the case” because the team had seen enough information previously to make him “confident we had gotten to the bottom of the…issue.” While the FBI ultimately concluded, after obtaining a search warrant and reviewing the Clinton-Abedin emails, that the Weiner laptop contained no significant new evidence, Comey had a very different view of its potential importance after being briefed on it on October 27.

The view that the Weiner laptop was unlikely to contain significant evidence arguably accorded with the FBI’s investigative strategy in this matter, although this approach was inconsistent with what witnesses told us was a “leave no stone unturned” approach to the investigation. As detailed in Chapter Five, the FBI Midyear team had decided to obtain or exploit only those personal devices directly associated with Clinton or the servers hosting clintonemail.com. The FBI sought no personal devices used by any other individual to conduct State Department work, including Mills, Abedin, and Sullivan. This included a decision not to seek the devices and culled work-related emails in the possession of Abedin’s attorney. Witnesses told us that the team’s focus was on Clinton’s conduct as opposed to the conduct of others, including Clinton’s senior aides, and the team assessed that Clinton’s devices and the laptops used to cull her emails were the most likely places to find the complete collection of emails from her tenure or evidence of Clinton’s intent. In addition, witnesses told us that the Midyear team deemed Abedin’s emails to be less likely to contain classified information given her role and the nature of her communications with Clinton.

We found the belief that the Weiner laptop was unlikely to contain significant evidence to be an insufficient justification for neglecting to take action on the Weiner laptop immediately after September 29. Unlike the personal devices that the FBI had previously decided not to attempt to acquire, the Weiner laptop was already in the FBI’s custody and known to contain potentially relevant emails. Even those FBI officials who told us they did not expect to find new evidence agreed that it was a logical investigative step to seek to obtain a search warrant so that they could review the contents of the potentially relevant emails. In addition, and as we note below, the FBI developed little additional information about what was on the Weiner laptop between September 29 and October 27. However, Comey’s reaction to the information he was presented on October 27—which was substantially similar to what FBI Midyear and Headquarters personnel knew on September 29—suggests that the Weiner laptop should have been viewed as a more significant discovery.

We hasten to add that not every witness described the Weiner laptop as being unlikely to contain significant evidence. In particular, McCabe said he thought that the discovery of the emails on the Weiner laptop was a “big deal” and that he understood that the FBI Midyear team was proceeding with obtaining authority to review the laptop contents during the period immediately after September 29. Yet McCabe took no action for weeks to obtain a progress report or otherwise ensure completion of the analysis and when he did finally do so it was in response to Toscas mentioning the laptop issue to him on October 24. McCabe also did not convey a much-needed sense of urgency about this matter to Comey. Instead, he told us he gave Comey a “fly-by” briefing about the discovery shortly after hearing about it on September 28. Comey told us he vaguely recalled hearing about the Weiner laptop around this time, but did not recall learning at that time any of the details that later caused him to announce the reactivation of the investigation on October 28. As the Deputy Director who was overseeing the Midyear investigation and who had been briefed by NYO on September 28 on the Weiner laptop discovery, McCabe should have demanded a progress report from the Midyear team and should have provided a full briefing to Comey well before October

27.180

The Russia investigation was a higher priority: On July 31, 2016, just weeks after the conclusion of the Midyear investigation, the FBI opened its investigation of Russian interference in the ongoing presidential election. Strzok and several others from the Midyear investigation were assigned to the Russia investigation, which we were told was extremely active during this September and October time period.181 Several witnesses, including Priestap, Strzok, and Page,

180 After reviewing a draft of the report, McCabe’s counsel submitted a written response stating that McCabe shared all of the information he knew about the Weiner laptop with Comey soon after he first learned about it, and that any claim that McCabe “failed to fully inform Director Comey of what he initially knew about the Weiner laptop is inaccurate.”

The submission also asserts that “[t]he OIG places inordinate weight on Mr. McCabe’s apparent reference during his OIG interview to a ‘fly by’ briefing of Director Comey in late September or early October.” However, as noted above, our primary concern was with McCabe’s failure to take any action in the weeks prior to October 24, and then doing so only in response to Toscas mentioning the laptop issue to him on October 24.

McCabe also asserts in his written response that the “importance of exploring this collection of emails [on the Weiner laptop] was not immediately obvious” because the FBI had learned about various collections of allegedly relevant emails throughout the Midyear investigation, most of which turned out to be duplicative of previously examined emails or of marginal significance—a statement that we note is at odds with his description of the emails to us during his testimony as a “big deal.” McCabe stated that it was “unfair and misleading” to place the blame squarely on him for failing to follow up on the Weiner laptop with sufficient urgency, “even though many people in both FBI Headquarters and the New York Office were responsible for pushing the matter forward and failed to do so.” McCabe described the delays in reviewing the Weiner laptop as a “failure with many fathers, including many other FBI executives, and not a shortcoming attributable to Mr. McCabe alone.” McCabe added, “And, while the OIG holds Mr. McCabe responsible for failing to demand progress reports, it is undeniable that Director Comey could have asked for updates based on what he had been told by Mr. McCabe, and he did not…. The OIG’s exercise of hindsight that leads it to place blame on Mr. McCabe—and only Mr. McCabe—for the failure to more promptly ‘demand a progress report,’…ignores the other FBI managers and executives who dropped the ball.”

181 We were surprised to learn that FBI leadership decided to assign many of the key members of the Midyear team, immediately after determining that no charges should be brought against then candidate Clinton, to the Russia investigation, which touched upon the campaign of then candidate Trump. This is particularly so given the questions being raised by candidate Trump and his supporters regarding the declination decision in the Midyear investigation. While we recognize that staffing decisions are for management to make, we question the judgment of assigning agents who had just determined that one candidate running in an election should not be prosecuted to an investigation that relates to the campaign of the other candidate in the election. The appearance problems created by such a staffing decision were exacerbated here due to the text messages expressing political opinions that we discuss later in this report. Surely, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division had talented agents who were not involved in the Midyear investigation who could have fully staffed the Russia investigation. Such a decision also would have eliminated the excuse we were

stated that the Russia investigation was a higher priority in October than reviewing the Weiner laptop. Priestap, in particular, provided convincing justifications for the prioritization decisions he made in light of his management responsibilities, including that Comey had tasked him with overseeing the FBI’s multifaceted efforts to protect the 2016 election from foreign interference.

Nevertheless, from an institutional perspective, we found this explanation unpersuasive and concerning. Strzok and the other Midyear personnel reassigned to the Russia investigation were not the only agents in the FBI. Had the FBI considered the Weiner laptop significant, additional personnel could have been assigned to handle it. Moreover, not all of the Midyear personnel were assigned to Russia. This was a staffing choice, not an excuse for inaction.

This is even more evident when contrasted with the attention that the FBI gave to other activities in connection with the Midyear investigation during the same period. As detailed in Chapter Eight, these activities included the preparation of Comey’s speech at the FBI’s SAC Conference on October 12—a speech designed to help equip SACs to “bat down” misinformation about the July 5 declination decision; the preparation and distribution of detailed talking points to FBI SACs in mid-October in order, again, “to equip people who are going to be talking about it anyway with the actual facts and [the FBI’s] actual perspective on [the declination]”; and a briefing for retired FBI agents conducted on October 21 for the purpose of describing the investigative decisions made during Midyear so as to arm former employees with facts so that they, too, might counter “falsehoods and exaggerations.” Some of these discretionary activities required significant efforts by members of the Midyear team. Moreover, some of the claims made in those talking points and presentations concerning the thoroughness of the investigation were at odds with the approach that these Midyear team members were taking with regard to the Weiner laptop.

In assessing the decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the Midyear-related investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop, we considered the text messages that Strzok exchanged with Page expressing hostility for then candidate Trump and preference for a Clinton victory. We were particularly concerned about text messages sent by Strzok and Page that potentially indicated or created the appearance that investigative decisions they made were impacted by bias or improper considerations. Most of the text messages raising such questions pertained to the Russia investigation, and the implication in some of these text messages, particularly Strzok’s August 8 text message (“we’ll stop” candidate Trump from being elected), was that Strzok might be willing to take official action to impact a presidential candidate’s electoral prospects. Under these circumstances, we did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the Midyear-related investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop was free from bias.

given here about the Russia investigation impacting the ability of agents to address the Weiner laptop issue.

We searched for evidence that the Weiner laptop was deliberately placed on the back-burner by others in the FBI to protect Clinton, but found no evidence in emails, text messages, instant messages, or documents that suggested an improper purpose. We also took note of the fact that numerous other FBI executives—including the approximately 39 who participated in the September 28 SVTC—were briefed on the potential existence of Midyear-related emails on the Weiner laptop. We also noted that the Russia investigation was under the supervision of Priestap—for whom we found no evidence of bias and who himself was aware of the Weiner laptop issue by September 29. However, we also did not identify a consistent or persuasive explanation for the FBI’s failure to act for almost a month after learning of potential Midyear-related emails on the Weiner laptop.

In sum, we concluded that the explanations given for the failure of the FBI to take action on the Weiner laptop between September 29 and the end of October were unpersuasive. The FBI had all the information it needed on September 29 to obtain the search warrant that it did not seek until more than a month later. The FBI’s neglect had potentially far-reaching consequences. Comey told the OIG that, had he known about the laptop in the beginning of October and thought the email review could have been completed before the election, it may have affected his decision to notify Congress. Comey told the OIG, “I don’t know [if] it would have put us in a different place, but I would have wanted to have the opportunity.”

1. Decision to Seek Search Warrant on October 27

Several FBI witnesses told us that the reason the FBI decided to seek a search warrant on October 27 was because the Midyear team learned important new information about the contents of the Weiner laptop at around that time. We concluded, however, that this decision resulted not from the discovery of dramatic new information about the Weiner laptop, but rather as a result of inquiries from the Weiner case agent and prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for SDNY on October 21.

We begin by noting that every fact that would ultimately be included in the October 30 search warrant that the Midyear team obtained to review the Weiner laptop was known to the FBI in late September. As we discuss in Chapter Eleven, the October 30 search warrant included limited factual information about what the Weiner case agent had seen during his review of the laptop. The search warrant stated that the FBI had “information indicating that there are thousands of Abedin’s emails on the [Weiner laptop] – including emails, during and around Abedin’s tenure at the State Department, from Abedin’s @clintonemail.com account as well as a Yahoo! Account appearing to belong to Abedin.” As detailed above, these facts were not only known to FBI NYO, but had been communicated to FBI Headquarters and FBI Midyear personnel on multiple occasions in late September.

Moreover, the information known to the Midyear team on October 27 when it briefed Comey about the laptop was substantially similar to the information that NYO had made known to FBI leadership and the FBI Midyear team on September 28 and 29. This information is summarized in the bullet points in the prior section. There was a conference call on October 26 between NYO and the FBI Midyear team which involved some participants who had not participated in the September 29 conference call, including Strzok and the Weiner case agent. However, apart from an update on the total number of emails on the laptop, we found no evidence the October 26 call involved the communication of significantly more specific information about the nature of the messages on the laptop.

Witnesses, including Comey, cited two pieces of information from the October 26 call that they described as new and of particular importance in triggering the decision to reactivate the investigation. The first involved the total volume of emails on the Weiner laptop. Contemporaneous notes show that during the September 29 call NYO reported that there were approximately 350,000 emails on the Weiner laptop, that these included emails between Huma Abedin and former Secretary Clinton using various Clinton-related domain names, and that the laptop was still being processed. On the October 26 call, NYO reported approximately 675,000 emails were on the laptop. We found that the increased volume of emails on the Weiner laptop—from 350,000 to 675,000—to have little or no significance in the absence of additional information about the content or metadata of the emails.

The second piece of new information cited by witnesses was the presence of BlackBerry backups on the laptop. However, this information was not new. One of the first messages the Weiner case agent saw on the laptop in late September was a BlackBerry message between Clinton and Abedin. And the Midyear SSA told us that the presence of BlackBerry information on the laptop was mentioned during the September 29 call between Midyear and NYO personnel.

While Comey and other witnesses gave much significance to the BlackBerry

data (the former describing them as the “golden emails”), very little specific

information was known about those messages as of October 27. No specific information had been developed or provided regarding the volume or date range of the BlackBerry data. We found no evidence that NYO provided any more specific information about the BlackBerry data in late October than they had previously provided in late September. Indeed, this seems even more apparent given the fact that NYO was legally prohibited under the scope of the Weiner search warrant from reviewing any information unrelated to their child exploitation investigation.

We found that what changed between September 29 and October 27 that finally prompted the FBI to take action was not new information about what was on the Weiner laptop but rather the inquiries from the SDNY prosecutors and then from the Department. The only thing of significance that had changed was the calendar and the fact that people outside of the FBI were inquiring about the status of the Weiner laptop.