The FBI still hasn’t turned over to the State Department any of the messages it reportedly obtained from the computer shared by top Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her now-estranged husband Anthony Weiner, the administration told a federal judge Tuesday.
FBI officials have signaled they will eventually turn over any State Department documents they obtain, lawyers said — but there is no time frame for doing so.
“We haven’t recovered anything from the FBI,” said Lisa A. Olson, the Justice Department lawyer handling the case.
The urgency of the case has declined after the election, which saw Ms. Abedin’s boss, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, suffer a shocking defeat.
A hearing that in the weeks ahead of the election drew massive interest from reporters instead saw less than a handful now. “What a shock that we have less interest today than in past hearings,” Judge James E. Boasberg said as he surveyed the empty courtroom.
Just weeks before Election Day, FBI Director James B. Comey told Congress his agents had come across new documents that were related to their investigation into Mrs. Clinton, which he’d closed out in July without recommending charges.
He never publicly confirmed the nature of the documents, but a number of media outlets said they were obtained from the computer shared by Ms. Abedin and Mr. Weiner. Mr. Weiner is facing his own investigation into whether he was exchanging sexually charged materials with minors.
Ms. Olson, the Justice Department lawyer, stressed Tuesday that they don’t have any official confirmation of the documents’ contents, but appeared to signal that the documents are indeed emails from Ms. Abedin’s accounts.
Ms. Olson said they’ve been told some of the documents are duplicates of what the State Department already has.
For now the State Department is still going through thousands of Clinton emails the FBI recovered during its criminal probe into the former secretary.
Those are being released monthly, after the State Department deletes duplicates.
Mrs. Clinton had insisted her lawyers had thoroughly scrubbed her emails and turned all of them that were work-related back over to the government in late 2014 — nearly two years after she left office.
But the FBI found thousands of messages it said were work-related but which she didn’t turn over.
Among those have been a handful of messages that contained information the government has now marked classified — further challenging Mrs. Clinton’s initial assertion that she never handled classified information on her secret account.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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