Book excerpt: An FBI sex crimes investigator helped trigger 2016’s ‘October Surprise’
Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2016 — The pressure had been building on Special Agent John Robertson for weeks, and the case agent tasked with investigating former congressman Anthony Weiner’s digital correspondence with a 15-year-old girl felt a growing sense of alarm that the next casualty of this crazy presidential election would be his FBI career.
At first glance, Robertson did not look much like an FBI agent. He had long brown hair he often kept pulled back. He liked to say the long hair, combined with a frequent work wardrobe of jeans, flannel shirts and T-shirts, softened his appearance and made it easier for victims of sex crimes to talk to him.
Among colleagues, Robertson was respected as a dedicated agent who had a knack for quickly developing a rapport with witnesses and victims. But this empathy also meant that at times he became emotionally invested in his cases.
After six years working organized and white collar crime, Robertson had switched over to the FBI New York office’s C-20 unit, investigating sex crimes against children. These cases require the mental fortitude to sift through thousands of images of grotesque and often sadistic treatment of children. For that reason, the members of the C-20 squad are essentially volunteers. Under FBI rules, agents working those cases can raise their hands at any time and ask for a new assignment.
“They do say, before you come on this squad, be ready to lose your faith in humanity,” Robertson told the television show “Inside the FBI: New York.” But he added, “There’s a sense of satisfaction that I have not had anywhere else.”
Working out of his cubicle in an office building in Lower Manhattan, Robertson was pursuing allegations in September 2016 that Weiner had sent sexually explicit messages to a teenage girl in another state. The case was another major setback for Weiner, a politician who once seemed to have a bright future after rising from New York City councilman to leading member of Congress. He had already immolated his political career with not one but two separate sexting scandals — the second as he tried to make a comeback with a run for mayor of New York. Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, had worked as a close aide to Hillary Clinton for years. After the texting allegation surrounding a teenage girl surfaced, Abedin announced she was separating from Weiner.
For Robertson, the Weiner case was not the problem. Or at least, it was not the biggest problem. The more pressing issue was the hundreds of thousands of Abedin’s emails, including many that were to or from Clinton, that Robertson had found on Weiner’s laptop in late September, when he had gotten a search warrant to look for possible images of sex crimes involving children.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/october-surprise-clinton-emails-fbi-/2020/09/17/518ef8a2-f2dc-11ea-b796-2dd09962649c_story.html