McCade's role in handling of Weiner's laptop with Clinton emails on it investigated by IG

Washington Post:

The Justice Department's inspector general has been focused for months on why Andrew McCabe, as the No. 2 official at the FBI, appeared not to act for about three weeks on a request to examine a batch of Hillary Clinton-related emails found in the latter stages of the 2016 election campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.

The inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, has been asking witnesses why FBI leadership seemed unwilling to move forward on the examination of emails found on the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) until late October — about three weeks after first being alerted to the issue, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

A key question of the internal investigation is whether McCabe or anyone else at the FBI wanted to avoid taking action on the laptop findings until after the Nov. 8 election, these people said. It is unclear whether the inspector general has reached any conclusions on that point.

A major line of inquiry for the inspector general has been trying to determine who at the FBI and the Justice Department knew about the Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop, and when they learned about them. McCabe is a central figure in those inquiries, these people said.
...
In late September 2016, FBI agents in New York were investigating Weiner for possible Internet crimes involving a teenage girl. In the course of that probe, they discovered that his laptop contained thousands of work emails belonging to Weiner's then-wife, Huma Abedin. Abedin was a longtime aide to Clinton, and agents wanted to know whether the emails in question might shed new light on the Clinton investigation, which had been closed in July without any charges.

The New York FBI office alerted FBI headquarters to the new email issue within days — accounts differ as to when precisely, but McCabe was aware of the matter by late September or early October at the latest, according to the people familiar with the matter. The agents on the Weiner case wanted to talk to the Clinton email investigators and see whether the messages were potentially important. Some people familiar with the matter said officials at FBI headquarters asked the New York agents to analyze the emails' metadata — the sender, recipient and times of the messages — to see whether they seemed relevant to the closed probe.

McCabe was involved in those discussions, but there are differing accounts about how much then-FBI Director James B. Comey understood about the matter in the early days of October.

An attorney for Comey could not immediately be reached for comment.

Some people involved at the time said Comey learned of the issue around the same time as McCabe. Others contend Comey did not know about it until weeks later. Senior Justice Department officials, according to several people familiar with the issue, were not notified until mid-October.

But for a period of at least three weeks, according to people involved at the time, nothing much happened — a lag that has sparked the inspector general's questions.
...
At the same time, the FBI was facing a new set of questions, this time about McCabe's role in a stalled probe into the Clinton Foundation. Some within the FBI felt McCabe had repeatedly moved to hamstring that probe and were suspicious of his motives for doing so, according to people familiar with the matter.
...

I suspect the FBI was embarrassed by the find on Weiner's computer in a matter they hoped to have put to rest.  It took them a while to rationalize an explanation for doing nothing with more evidence Hillary Clinton her staff's mishandling of classified material.   While Clinton may think the notification of Congress was the cause of a political problem that just shows how out of touch she was for the proper handling of classified material.  It never would have been a political issue if she had properly handled the material from the beginning.


When you put this in the context of the Trump hatred at the FBI as demonstrated by the text messages, it seems clear that the FBI was determined to avoid its responsibilities in order to keep her a viable candidate for President, and she kept screwing that up.

If the FBI had prosecuted her like they would anyone else who engaged in similar activity, the revelations of the Weiner laptop would have just been an additional count in the indictment.