It seems that the efforts of a certain FBI special agent helped trigger the 2016 investigation into the emails of Hillary Clinton, then a Democratic presidential hopeful competing with Donald Trump for the office of POTUS, the Washington Post reports, citing a fragment from a new upcoming book.
According to the newspaper, Special Agent John Robertson was tasked with investigating former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s interactions with a 15-year old girl when, while searching the congressman's laptop, he stumbled upon “hundreds of thousands” of Huma Abedin's emails (Abedin was married to Weiner at the time), “including many that were to or from Clinton”.
Yet even as Robertson flagged those emails to his supervisors at the end of September, he then “had heard nothing”.
“The crickets I was hearing was really making me uncomfortable because something was going to come down”, Robertson would later tell internal investigators.
Eventually, the agent “had put it all down in writing, should someone come looking”, and then sent it in an email to himself, and the following week, then-FBI Director James Comey “sent a short letter to Congressional leaders announcing the FBI "has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation”.
The aforementioned book, “October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election”, is expected to be published by PublicAffairs on 22 September, and is touted by WaPo as a “comprehensive, revealing and dramatic look inside the bureau’s role in the 2016 presidential election”.
