To: Old Boothby who wrote (976454 ) 10/29/2016 10:52:06 PM From: bentway Read Replies (2) | Respond to Shortly after two o’clock, Pete Williams, NBC News’s justice correspondent, reported that although Comey told Congress in July that the Clinton investigation had been completed, it hadn’t technically ever ended. There were still some staffers working on the case, so it wasn’t accurate to say, as Chaffetz had done, that it had been reopened. the e-mails in question were unrelated to the WikiLeaks dump of messages and documents hacked from Podesta’s account; they hadn’t been sent by Hillary Clinton; and they hadn’t been withheld from the F.B.I. by the Clintons, the Clinton campaign, or the State Department. What happened, Williams said, was that, in the course of a separate investigation, the F.B.I. had come across a “device” that had led them to the e-mails of interest. according to Williams, there wasn’t any basis for these claims. “It looks at this point like being very thorough and very careful, not that this is going . . . to be a game changer,” Williams told viewers. “One official said, ‘I don’t sense alarm bells going on at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department over this.’ ” Finally, Williams said there was no chance that the F.B.I. would finish up its investigation into the newfound e-mails before the election, on November 8th. The agency’s work would go on for quite a while, he said. Williams’s reporting appeared to have cleared up quite a bit, and it made the news seem a lot less earth-shattering and damaging for Clinton than it had initially appeared. Evidently, the F.B.I. was trying to tie up some loose ends, not revisiting the central conclusion of its original inquiry: that there wasn’t a criminal case to bring against Clinton, or anybody associated with her. Later in the afternoon, a senior law-enforcement source told NBC News that Comey had sent the letter to Congress “out of an abundance of caution.” newyorker.com
