Lawyer questions whether FBI had probable cause after warrant for Clinton-Abedin emails is unsealed
The FBI did not have probable cause when it sought a warrant for Hillary Clinton’s emails, less than two weeks before the election, contends the lawyer who sued for the documents’ release.
There’s “nothing at all in the search warrant application that would give rise to probable cause, nothing that would make anyone suspect that there was anything on the laptop beyond what the FBI had already searched and determined not to be evidence of a crime, nothing to suggest that there would be anything other than routine correspondence between Secretary Clinton and her longtime aide Huma Abedin,” E. Randol Schoenberg told the Washington Post. “I am appalled.”
Schoenberg is a Los Angeles lawyer whose work focuses on recovering property stolen by Nazi authorities during the Holocaust. He had filed a suit on Dec. 12 for the release of the warrant (PDF), which was unsealed Tuesday with some redactions.
The FBI initially obtained a search warrant for a computer that belongs to Anthony Weiner, Abedin’s estranged husband who was being investigated for exchanging explicit messages with an underage girl.
During that investigation, the Washington Post reports, the FBI found “thousands” of Abedin’s emails corresponding with Clinton, some of which were sent when Clinton was secretary of state. According to the newspaper, the FBI had not had time to review the communications, other than the exchanges’ headers, when they sought the warrant. It was granted by U.S. Magistrate Judge Kevin Nathaniel Fox on Oct. 30.
“The government was plainly fishing with a large net,” Barry Pollack, a white-collar criminal defense attorney, told the Washington Post.
But they did meet the standard to obtain a warrant, says Edward B. MacMahon Jr., another white-collar defense attorney.
“Look, probable cause is such a low standard,” he told the newspaper. “The way I read this is they’re saying they found another computer that may have had additional emails on it, and they wanted to search that computer. That’s completely consistent with what the FBI would want to do in a case like this.”
The warrant was damaging for Clinton, says her lawyer David E. Kendall.
“The affidavit concedes that the FBI had no basis to conclude whether these emails were even pertinent to that closed investigation, were significant, or whether they had, in fact, already been reviewed prior to the closing of the investigation,” he said. “What does become unassailably clear, however, is that as the sole basis for this warrant, the FBI put forward the same evidence the Bureau concluded in July was not sufficient to bring a case—the affidavit offered no additional evidence to support any different conclusion.”
The FBI declined to comment to the Washington Post, as did Abedin. Bloomberg and the Associated Press also have stories.
