John Robertson (Credit: USA Network/YouTube)
“An FBI agent who found the messages that led to the Hillary Clinton email investigation being reopened days before the 2016 election said the way the bureau handled the case was ‘not ethically or morally right’.
John Robertson feared he would be made a ‘scapegoat’ when he found the new emails less than two months before voting day, in the wake of DailyMail.com’s revelation that Anthony Weiner, whose wife Huma Abedin was Clinton’s top aide, was sexting an underage girl.
Robertson watched nervously as the bureau did nothing for a month until he went outside the chain of command and spoke with the US Attorney’s office overseeing the case.
The only advice from his bosses was to erase his office computer, which meant leaving no record of his investigations, a new book says.
As Robertson put it: ‘To this day don’t understand what the hell went wrong’, the Washington Post reported.
The claims add another layer of intrigue to the investigation of Clinton’s emails which has become one of the most divisive episodes of the 2016 election.
They appear in October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election, which will be published on September 22 by PublicAffairs.
(…) October Surprise reveals Robertson’s frustration and anxiety began to fester in September after he found around 600,000 emails from Abedin including many that were to or from Clinton.
They were on Weiner’s laptop, which he examined in his office at the FBI New York office’s C-20 unit, which is tasked with investigating sex crimes against children.
But he couldn’t examine the messages, even to determine how many were Clinton’s, because the subpoena that was used to seize Weiner’s laptop was too narrow and did not allow it.
Late in September Robertson notified his bosses about his discovery, but after that he heard nothing.
He later told internal investigators: ‘The crickets I was hearing was really making me uncomfortable because something was going to come down.
‘Why isn’t anybody here? Like if I’m the supervisor of any (counterintelligence) squad … 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 a** on the phone, call (the case agent) and get a copy of that drive,” because that’s how it should be. (Read more: The Daily Mail, 9/18/2020) (Archive)