FBI Director James Comey’s announcement Friday that his agency would revisit the probe into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified material immediately raised new questions about what evidence agents may have missed in the year they had already spent investigating the case.
In a letter to members of Congress, Comey said an “unrelated case” led agents to additional Clinton emails that may contain classified information. A congressional aide told the Washington Examiner the letter came to members completely “out of the blue” on Friday.
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The announcement came after months of ire among retired FBI agents and congressional Republicans who felt Comey drew the wrong conclusion from a body of evidence that should have earned Clinton and her aides indictments at the hands of a grand jury that was never convened.
Despite the thousands of hours that dozens of agents spent pouring over Clinton’s server, its contents and hundreds of pages of witness testimony, fresh evidence apparently unearthed in a separate case sparked the FBI’s renewed interest in the case.
A huge unanswered question: What is the “unrelated case” that the FBI is referring to, by which they have come across more Clinton emails?
— Matt Viser (@mviser) October 28, 2016
The intriguing line in Comey’s letter is “In connection with an unrelated case” – who else are they investigating? We know about McAuliffe. https://t.co/H32dmaBblT
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) October 28, 2016
It wasn’t clear Friday afternoon what case that might be. However, the FBI had opened an investigation into Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton ally, last year after an unnamed bank alerted the FBI to possible problems related to transactions that also involved the Clinton Foundation.
While senior Justice Department officials ultimately decided against pursuing a Clinton Foundation probe, the FBI did reportedly open an investigation into whether McAuliffe had taken illegal campaign contributions from a Chinese businessman.
News of the reopened Clinton email case came just days after McAuliffe’s six-figure donations to the state senate campaign of the wife of a senior FBI agent came to light. The FBI denied any impropriety in the donations, but the newly-discovered money trail prompted a fresh round of criticism from Republicans already skeptical of the bureau’s impartiality.
When Comey announced the end of the FBI investigation in July, he said he had discovered hundreds of classified emails on Clinton’s server. However, he decided not to recommend an indictment because his agents, at the time, found no evidence of intent.
It is unclear whether the new, potentially classified emails will change Comey’s calculus when it comes to the question of intent.
In addition, at least five witnesses had already been protected by immunity deals struck in the course of the year-long probe. Questions remain as to whether the “unrelated case” Comey cited will yield evidence that falls outside of those immunity protections.
