The most uncomfortable photo of Hillary Clinton
FBI investigates new private emails from Hillary Clinton
The documents come from a separate case involving the husband of a Democratic aide
The FBI announced this Friday that it will analyze new emails from Hillary Clinton in relation to the investigation that she had closed for her use of a private server as secretary of state. The agency thus reopens its investigations to determine if those documents contain classified information. The emails were discovered in a separate case involving Anthony Weiner, the husband of a Clinton aide. The announcement comes less than two weeks before the presidential election in which the Democrat leaves with an advantage over Republican Donald Trump, which will presumably make it a central issue in the final stretch of the campaign.
In a letter to the leaders of Congress, the director of the FBI, James Comey, explains that he does not know if the new documents will provide relevant data and warns that he cannot predict how long the FBI will take to analyze them, so it is unknown if there will be news sooner. of the November 8 elections.
The new emails, according to US media, were obtained after the FBI seized electronic devices from Weiner and his wife Huma Abedin, Clinton's right-hand man, as part of the investigation into him for sending messages to women and photos of sexual content. In one of them, Weiner appeared with his young son next to him. Those communications led Abedin to announce the separation of her husband in August, who had sent similar messages in the past.
In the first public assessment of it, Clinton asked the FBI to "immediately release all the facts" related to the new investigations and declared "confident" that the new emails will not find anything criminal.
Comey's notification is first and foremost a formalism. The director of the FBI affirmed under oath in Congress that the agency had "completed its investigation" of Clinton's private servant, so he now had to communicate to the legislators that his testimony must be "completed", as he himself explains in the letter. That is, by obtaining new information, he was forced to amend her testimony. If Comey had not informed Congress before the elections, he could have been accused of wanting to interfere in the result.
The FBI closed the Clinton investigation in July considering that, despite having acted "extremely careless" in handling official information with her private email, she had not committed any crime. The FBI's decision led the Justice Department not to press charges against the former secretary of state, providing a respite for the Democrat's campaign.
The unexpected announcement by the FBI this Friday could be for Clinton what in American political jargon is called the October surprise, an unexpected event that can alter the electoral campaign. This is the third uncomfortable news this week for the Democrat after announcing a severe increase in the price of insurance from President Barack Obama's health care reform and the release of a secret email that exhibits the fine line between the Clinton Foundation and the benefits of marriage.
Clinton has a five point lead over Trump, according to the average of the polls carried out by the Real Clear Politics publication. The case of the Democrat's private server, from which she operated the mail that she used as head of US diplomacy between 2009 and 2013, has weighed down her campaign in the last year and has fueled suspicions of secrecy that have haunted the marriage for years. Clinton.
Republicans have tried to use the private mail case to project an opaque and criminal image of the Democratic candidate that she has joined with the conservative ranks. The songs from To Jail about Clinton were the soundtrack to the Republican convention last July.
“The corruption of Hillary Clinton is on a scale that we have never seen before. We must not allow her to take her criminal scheme to the Oval Office, ”Trump said in a statement following the FBI announcement. The New York millionaire threatened two weeks ago to jail his rival if he is elected president and said he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate her.
Following the FBI announcement, which led to a stock market crash in New York, the leader of Congress, Republican Paul Ryan, called for Clinton to stop receiving intelligence briefings given to presidential candidates.
In the letter, Director Comey reveals that the agency, from an "unrelated case" that does not specify, has learned of the "existence of emails that appear to be relevant" in the Clinton investigation. Comey was informed Thursday of the new material. "I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps for investigators to review these emails to determine if they contain classified information, as well as assess their relevance to our investigation," he notes.
Clinton's private servant became known in March 2015. Since then, the case has become an endless political soap opera, in which the trail of new revelations or related episodes has been constant. For example, it was revealed that Clinton deleted half of the messages that were on his server, considering them to be personal.
In the previous investigation, the FBI reviewed more than 30,000 email messages and the various servers that hosted those communications. The agency determined that around a hundred of those emails were classified at the time.
