‘October Surprise’: New details emerge about FBI delay on Weiner laptop in 2016

by Jerry Dunleavy, Justice Department Reporter | | September 19, 2020 04:05 PM

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/october-surprise-new-details-emerge-about-fbi-delay-on-weiner-laptop-in-2016

New details have emerged about 2016’s "October Surprise," during which the FBI found emails belonging to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on disgraced New York Rep. Anthony Weiner’s laptop, with the FBI official who found the emails speaking out for the first time.

FBI agent John Robertson, who worked in its New York office’s child sex crimes unit and was later cited (though not named) in Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 2018 report on the handling of the investigation of Clinton's unauthorized private email server, spoke with the Washington Post’s Devin Barrett for his upcoming book, October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election. Robertson unearthed tens of thousands of Clinton emails in late September 2016 on the laptop belonging to Weiner, the husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, in a sex crimes case involving underage girls, but for weeks after being alerted, top FBI leaders (including fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, fired FBI agent Peter Strzok, and former FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap) took little to no action to investigate.

A letter from fired FBI Director James Comey to Congress in late October about the email discovery, shortly after he was finally briefed on it, disrupted the election — and would be blamed by some for President Trump’s victory.

“The crickets I was hearing was really making me uncomfortable because something was going to come down,” Robertson said he later told Justice Department investigators. “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 ass on the phone, call [the case agent], and get a copy of that drive,’ because that’s how it should be. And that nobody reached out to me within, like, that night, I still to this day don’t understand what the hell went wrong.”