Huma Abedin, the longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, officially responded through a lawyer about the FBI’s investigation of a laptop used by her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner.
FBI director James Comey on Friday announced that the law enforcement agency would be re-opening an investigation into Clinton’s private email server, notifying Congress in a letter about the launching of the new review.
Comey’s letter to Congress said emails found on the laptop “appear to be pertinent to our investigation.” Both Republican and Democratic members of Congress have criticized the move.
Abedin’s attorney told CBS in in a statement: “[Abedin] only learned for the first time on Friday, from press reports, of the possibility that a laptop belonging to Mr. Weiner could contain emails of hers. While the FBI has not contacted us about this, Ms. Abedin will continue to be, as she always has been, forthcoming and cooperative.”
The FBI has built a software program that is poring over hundreds of thousands of emails found on Weiner’s laptop.
It’s possible that Abedin did not know about the emails on Weiner’s computer, forgot about them or for some other reason did not turn them over.
In a sworn deposition taken in June as part of a lawsuit filed by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch, Abedin was asked about what devices she had used to send or receive messages from her account on the clintonemail.com server. As part of the process in 2015 of returning her work-related emails to the State Department, Abedin said she “looked for all the devices that may have any of my State Department” work and provided two laptops and a Blackberry to her lawyers for review.
Abedin made no mention of there being additional devices where her emails might have been saved.
If the FBI finds emails Abedin sent or received through the clintonemail.com server archived on the device recently recovered from her home, that might appear to conflict with what she told the FBI earlier this year.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
