Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin says she does not know how her emails got on her husband Anthony Weiner's laptop and was baffled by the FBI's recent declaration of that being the case, a person familiar with Abedin's reaction told Politico.
The confusion comes alongside FBI officials' off-the-record assertions that thousands of emails on Weiner's laptop appeared tied to Clinton's private server; agents will now look at the messages and compare them to emails they already looked at during an investigation into Clinton's use of the server to see if any contained classified information.
While the FBI has maintained that they "cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant," in order to get a warrant to review the emails they would have likely needed to argue that the contents contained evidence of a crime.
"The big issue to my mind is: In order to seize evidence on the computer, it needs to be just immediately apparent that it's evidence of a crime. It's hard to know how that would be the case here," former federal computer crimes prosecutor Orin Kerr told Politico. "It sounds like the government thinks this information might be relevant and they'd like to take a look at it, but it's not immediately apparent to me that it would be evidence of a crime."
Weiner's laptop was originally seized in a separate investigation into reports that Weiner sent sexual messages to an underage girl. If Abedin has since given the FBI permission to search the new emails, a second warrant may have been unnecessary; Abedin is believed to be cooperating with the investigation "completely," Politico reports.