"The FBI is to scour 650,000 emails on the laptop of a former congressman connected to Hillary Clinton, it has been reported. The Wall Street Journal tweeted: "Thousands may be tied to Clinton's server." The Journal added that "metadata" on Anthony Weiner's laptop had suggested such "ties". Its article reported that a review lasting "weeks" would examine the emails' content, whether they were duplicates of messages already seen by the FBI, and whether they contained classified information." Skynews
————-
Well, pilgrims… There is no way that the FBI can review this many e-mails in the time available. My sense is that the Democratic senators involved will probably demand Comey's resignation on Tuesday. IMO that would just make Clinton look worse in the eyes of many.
Let us assume for a moment that she will still be elected. IMO she would be the most wounded president ever to take the oath of office.
I cannot imagine how she could govern the country, pl
http://news.sky.com/story/clinton-probe-fbi-to-scour-650000-weiner-emails-10639232
Perhaps getting into nerdish ranges, but 650,000 text messages is, being generous, well under 10 gigabytes. It’s true that for humans to look over every one of them would take a long time, but there are standard utilities, like UNIX GREP or its Windows FINDSTR equivalent that would spot stuff like “Secret”, “Confidential”, “(C)”, “(S)” and a long list of other terms of interest — those terms having been identified in the previous server investigation — in minutes, not more than hours.
Similar techniques would identify files already discovered in the previous server investigation.
So, once the FBI gets access to the files, I’d think progress toward a resolution of the question should be rapid.
The claim is 650,000 emails in total on that laptop. We don’t know how many were Abedin’s and how many were Weiner’s. But it still shows thousands tied to the HRC email server. I wonder if that 650,000 includes text messages and tweets. That seems like an astronomical number for a laptop. Am I wrong?
Sir
The Borg Queen would not have had any legitimacy with Les Deplorables even before L’Affaire Weiner. Now, it will be even worse as many will see her getting preferential treatment compared to ordinary citizens. She and her coterie have demonstrated a complete contempt for the law.
The honorable thing for her would be to step down. But her ego and all the Borgists will prevent her from doing that. Instead they will make a total mockery of the law. If elected she will claim vindication and put a kibosh on any further investigations. That will force the GOP if they don’t want a complete revolt of half their caucus to impeach. Of course the Senate will not convict even if there is incontrovertible evidence.
Sir, I believe you will once again be proven correct. IMO, if elected the Borg Queen’s term will be a civil war in discourse, in the courts and in public opinion.
TTG
I checked with my IT man. Depending on the machine and program it is quite possible to have 650,000 e-mails in your in-box. He says he has 200K himself. As has been said several times here, Outlook seals the users accounts off from each other. Was this Outlook? I dunno. I will guess that an indictment is possible. pl
The number implies that this the machine was acting as a depository for quite some time, and it would also imply that either (a) Huma didn’t bother to change her password for a very long stretch of time, or (b) she in fact knew about it.
According to Joe DiGenova, the laptops seized from Cheryl Milles, etc., by the FBI which were to be destroyed, were in fact not destroyed over the refusal of FBI agents to do so.
eakens IMO it is quite possible that she did not understand the e-mail programs and systems well enough to be worried about this enormous liability. pl
Maybe having the most wounded president in history was the goal.
Trump can bring this home. Don’t believe the media gaslighting.
Conservative Treehouse even accurately predicted on what *day* the media cycle of manipulation would end:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/10/28/a-warning-a-reminder-the-final-ten-days-2/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/10/29/donald-trump-and-mike-pence-stride-confidently-amid-surging-support-polls-and-crowds/
Meanwhile, key swing states are looking good for Trump:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/10/29/update-ballot-and-voting-data-from-nevada-and-ohio-look-very-good-for-trump/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/10/30/nyt-florida-poll-showcases-pending-trump-landslide-victory/
I’m a retired federal agent (not FBI, but I did work with them on occasion). My guess, knowing how agents think, is that Comey was facing a rebellion in the ranks for the many irregular ways this case was handled, particularly the decision not to refer it to DOJ prosecutor for an indictment/declination decision.
Hillary’s people bashing Comey shows again how profoundly arrogant and stupid they are. Had Comey tried to quash this and several agents had gone forward to the press or congress as whistleblowers with what they knew, not only would the “smoking gun” (if there is one) already be out there but the political damage would have been far, far worse. Given that this is probably the BEST case scenario for Hillary under the circumstances, she is in deep doo-doo indeed.
How ironic is it that a former member of the Watergate committee may end up as a repeat of Nixon–winning the election only to be forced out of office by information already readily available before the polling began?
We don’t know the brand of machine , how old it is, etc. Give us how many days it has operated in this mode and we might be able to make sense of the volume, or not.
I had the same reaction, though, to that number. It seems nearly insane for an individual to have received that many messages over just several years and even attempted to read the majority of them. I wonder how many were just CYA cc or bcc. I got plenty of those at work.
It comes of hubris, arrogance and forgetting the Ollie North lesson.
Hillary’s private server ran Microsoft Exchange, so it would be a good bet that the messages on the laptop were accumulated via Outlook.
Babelfish
“I wonder how many were just CYA cc or bcc. I got plenty of those at work. ” That would be unimportant. pl
karl Boyken
“Outlook?” Ah .. That explains a lot. pl
In fact, this is the problem the NSA deals with on a continual basis, how do you extract meaningful information from the huge amount of data they amass. The NSA would have tools to dig through all this email; who knows whether the FBI has access to them.
As an IT person I can assure you that every end user thinks they knows as much about computers as people who have done nothing but study them for decades. Most people can’t comprehend the depth of knowledge that many IT people have. They think all there is to it is clicking buttons. For the vast majority of my career my bosses didn’t understand what I did. They just knew they needed me.
Thats a remarkably socialist country you guys have down there. Most countries in the world when the underlings get ratchety the whole lot of them get fired.
Depends, if it is unwatched, how much of that is in the spam folder.
But after seeing day after day after day of Podesta e-mails, maybe the number isn’t crazy
It looks like the FBI has obtained a search warrant.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-30/fbi-obtains-warrant-search-huma-abedins-emails
The 33,000 e-mails that HRC deleted would be a good place to start and identifying them should be a trivial task.
I have always maintained that Trump was going to win and the “polling” was an attempt to shape a Narrative. PsyOps against us. When Trump won the media was going to demand that he prove he is “willing to work with the Democrats”, cause a Republican win means the public wants “bipartisanship” while a Democratic win is always framed as a mandate.
Now when the Trumpslide occurs, it’ll be “the FBI elected Trump”. Look for positive framing of Soros funded riots as “democracy in action”. Personally Trump could proscribe the MSM and Id see no problems. Of course, he won’t do that, but he k is how to hit them on the business side.
After the slick moves in the summer that got the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s illegal e-mail server closed out by the U.S. “Department of Justice”, all looked rosy in the political racket. But on Friday, 28 October, when FBI Director James Comey sent his little letter to 16 people in Congress, the facade cracked and the fast-pitch game started.
Here is the letter faxed last night from four U.S. Senators to Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch–
http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/lettercomey.pdf
Senators Leahy, Cardin, Carper, and Feinstein want them to provide by tomorrow (31 October): “more detailed information about the investigative steps that are being taken, the number of emails involved, and what is being done to determine how many of the emails are duplicative of those already reviewed by the FBI”.
The Guardian newspaper helpfully notes that the four senators each will probably be chairmen of senate committees if the Democrats become the majority there after the election–
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/30/democratic-senators-fbi-director-comey-clinton-emails-letter
Sen. Leahy (judiciary committee), Cardin (foreign relations), Carper (homeland security and governmental affairs), and Feinstein (intelligence) (that would be a mistake).
Also last night, a letter from Jamie Gorelick (Clinton administration) and Larry Thompson (Bush jr.), both former Deputy Attorney Generals (the number two person), which Comey also was, put a letter in the Washington Post that Comey, with his letter to Congress, is “damaging our democracy”.–
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/james-comey-is-damaging-our-democracy/2016/10/29/894d0f5e-9e49-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html?utm_term=.8d45b1347daf
Some little group called the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, which is associated with a PAC that is against Donald Trump (confusingly called Keep America Great PAC), filed a complaint against Comey with the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility, accusing him of violating the Hatch act through his letter to Congress–
http://www.keepamericagreat.us/comeydojcomplaint
Comey, the weird-o Weiner, and perhaps even Huma Abedin, can learn the wisdom of this precise explanation–
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-8uMYYcTsw
BraveNewWorld,
Perhaps I am the exception to your rule. As a mere end user, I am well aware of my existence as an old analog refugee lost in this new digital world.
I wonder if Weiner didn’t have a folder named “Life Insurance” for all these emails, I suspect Weiner does have some amount of internet savvy.
I agree again with Tyler, Trump was going to win anyway, this new revelation gives the propaganda networks a way to save face.
Karl Kolchack,
I believe that when she was working for the Watergate committee, that Hillary studied the Nixon Coverup very carefully and analyzed all its weak points and points of entry. She did that so she could do a better coverup when she decided she needed one.
And her better coverup was indeed better, and it held for a good long while. If it finally breaks, her millions of dead end worshippers will spend the rest of their lives condemning the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy which brought her down.
And the ClintonWorld Foundation Coverup may still keep holding. And all of Mister Clinton’s Coverups may keep holding as well. As brilliant shysters, the team of Clinton and Clinton did construct some very well inter-woven and cross-ramified coverups.
The reporters are now talking metadata – the address/subject lines that you seee in an Inbox – really just a pointer to the actual email in a “cloud” server farm somewhere.
I agree with Allen. It won’t take long to find out if their are duplicate or non-duplicate emails that were subject of the earlier investigation. Going through them to look for things that might lead to an obstruction charge would be more time consuming issue.
Perhaps the figure is so high because Weiner was a Congressman for more than a decade? Do US Representatives keep copies of everything their staff ever goes thru? If that’s the case you’d think they would avoid mixing his and hers. A Congressman and a Clinton aide can afford all the computers they want.
tilde,
I did a little ciphering on that number. If an account received 100 emails a day for five years, there would be 182,500 emails. Given the position of these two, they would have many more email accounts with some getting well over 100 emails a day. SWMBO and I get over 50 a day. I am retired and we are both living a near hermit-like existence. So I can now see how that mountain of 650,000 emails came to be.
It also (1) restores the standing of the FBI as an institution of integrity and (2) forestalls the potential release of really damaging materials by Wikileaks, Fancy Bear, Kim Dotcom or others.
umm, yet HRC claimed only 63,000 emails after 4 years as Sec of State, roughly half of which she said were personal.
Given her social proclivities and position as SoS this surely must be at the top end so x2 + 25% = 157,000 for 2 people for 5 years. The numbers might work if all top dogs in Clinton world had to CC Abedin on all clinton-related correspondence. So Podesta talking to Mook would end up in Abedin’s email account.
re: “Outlook seals the users accounts off from each other.”
Ditto for Mozilla’s Thunderbird, which has been my email client since shortly after it was first released 12 years ago.
And you can imagine how Trump could govern the country?
in “pay for play” and other shenanigans the bcc’s could point to hidden chains
the bcc recipients are hidden from the addressee’s and cc’s
As to whether these were duplicates of prior clintonemail.com e-mails or not certainly should not matter in light of Huma now claiming she does not know how they got on Anthony Weiners laptop. Her lack of accepting knowledge of how the e-mails got there indicate a surreptitious manner in how the e-mails arrived on that computer. Now if duplicates then someone is going to jail cause there were Top Secret, Secret and Confidential information on them e-mails. Oh what a web the Clintons weave.
Kurt,
I can’t because the elite GOP and Dems hate him and won’t let him do a thing. They will let Clinton do what ever she wants.
Seems that Comey should be subject to the Hatch Act and rightly so regardless of the results (which he had no idea about when he made his comments).
TTG: It seems like an excessive number of wedding planning and yoga emails. Isn’t that what we were told they were?
Tyler: Thank of how many paychecks in the Northern Virginia suburbs Trump will endanger? Lobbyists and influence peddlers need to eat too.
I am certain that is the idea. However the FBI has from the beginning had a sketchy history of being a paramilitary political police organization masquerading as a crime fighting agency.
Wikileaks or one of the Guccifers or any of them could still release something that could blow this right out of the water.
I suspect Anthony Weiner will be found like Danny Casolaro or Vince Foster.
UK bookies still have HRC odds on at 1:3. But don’t forget they heavily favored the remainders over Brexit. Their election record is rather good though, for the most part.
Linda,
So AG Lynch’s actions in meeting with the Bill Clinton should also be considered a Hatch Act violation or do you buy the paper thin tale of a coincidental meeting to talk about the grandchildren?
Matthew,
Let them eat gravel. Let them fight squirrels in the park for the nuts under the trees.
Let’s say I have two accounts stored in Outlook or Thunderbird, for example.
1. When I start the application, I’ll either be automatically logged-in or I’ll be prompted for my username/password. Password info is normally stored in the cache automatically but you can change these settings so that you’re prompted every run-time.
2. New messages will only be downloaded to an account when I’m logged-in to that account, and will be downloaded according to whatever push settings I’ve set-up.
3. The 650,000 emails might have been downloaded in one go, or they may have accumulated over time.
—
Abedin’s account settings may have been stored in the client, along with her Husband’s. If this was the case, then the client may have continued to download messages for her account each time Wiener started-up the email client (even after his wife moved out).
If her account settings weren’t stored in the client, then the client would be unable to download any new messages and would prompt any user for a username/password when they tried to click on that account. Only people who knew those account details would be able to download messages.
It’s possible that Wiener knew his wife’s account details, or that she stored them in the client herself. In either case, she would have given her husband access to her emails, illegally.
—
It’s also possible that Abedin changed the settings of the client so that she’d be prompted for her username/password each time. The 650k emails may have been stored in the device from the time when she left Wiener; it’s possible that no new emails were downloaded from the server to the client since the last time she used the client. He might not have had access to them at any time.
—
In any case, if there is any classified information contained within these emails, they should never have been sent to the device, regardless of whether or not Wiener had access to them. The device wasn’t secure. This alone should see her sent to prison.
All,
have heard Trump and his surrogates talk frequently about so-called ‘bleaching’ and ‘acid-washing’, even referring to software known as ‘BleachBit’. It’s claimed that this is “expensive” and inferred that it’s an intensive or complicated process.
I’m sure I’m not the only person reading this who uses BleachBit. It cost me nothing. No chemicals are involved. That’s not how BleachBit works.
I use it all the time, in the same way I use my document shredder. Then again, I’m not required to keep a record of my correspondence for posterity…
You can’t ‘delete’ data from modern harddrives/flash memory. The best way to ‘delete’ data is to encrypt it.
One thing that has shocked me this cycle is the discovery that these people don’t even have the slightest notion of OPSEC. Yahoo and GMail accounts; no encryption; unsecure devices; and so on. If I’d had the will…
The US is not secure so long as it allows people with this level of access to manage their own communications.
They’ll be lobbying–successfully–for the squirrels in less than a week.
BabelFish,
You’ve never been in a workgroup with a distributed team that argues for a living, have you? 😉 I’ve been in engagements where I easily received 2000+ emails a day, without counting spam or other solicitations. So that number could come together in a year, no sweat.
What intrigues me more is the twitter stinkbomb about the Bill Clinton/March Rich pardon investigation docs. It almost seems like someone timed that to embarrass Comey and whoever is driving the email investigation.
Col.,
There are a great many possible email configurations. It is tempting to extrapolate from ones own situation, but that may lead one down the wrong path.
Let’s start with information that is publicly available:
1. one of HRC’s stated goals was to use a blackberry to access her emails.
2. HRC liked to read documents in paper form.
A typical configuration for this is a blackberry/smartphone only client where email is kept on the server and web clients (like outlook web access) are used to access email when on a laptop. Circa mid-2000’s many firms, wanting to support a mobile workforce, moved away from the desktop email client and it’s security and compliance headaches. That dinosaur became the province of small businesses and private individuals. (I myself haven’t downloaded emails to a laptop since 2007).
Again, no email is downloaded to a laptop. Given the number of blackberries and smart devices one sees in the Clinton entourage, there is some evidence for this scenario.
It also seems that one of Abedin’s jobs was to download docs and print them out for HRC. That seems to be for what she used at least one of her accounts. That might account for the use of Weiner’s laptop.
Now there are all sorts of other things that one can do with email, automatic forwarding — where a duplicate of each email is forwarded on to a different account — being just one of them.
Suffice it to say that even educated speculation is likely to be wrong in the face of so many possibilities.