An FBI sex crimes investigator helped trigger the October 2016 investigation into then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s emails.
According to an excerpt of the forthcoming book “October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election” published by The Washington Post, an FBI sex crimes investigator found a tranche of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s emails.
Special Agent John Robertson was tasked with investigating former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-N.Y.) interactions with a 15-year-old girl. Wiener, who was later convicted on charges of transmitting sexual material to a minor, was married to Abedin at the time.
According to the book, while Robertson was searching Weiner’s laptop on a warrant to look for possible images of sex crimes involving children, he found hundreds of thousands of emails between Adedin and Clinton.
Robertson reportedly did not hear anything from his supervisors when he flagged the emails in September. He then had a series of pained interactions with supervisors and prosecutors leading up to the October investigation.
“The crickets I was hearing was really making me uncomfortable because something was going to come down,” Robertson later told internal investigators, the book recounts.
“And that nobody reached out to me within, like, that night, I still to this day don’t understand what the hell went wrong.”
Fearing prosecution and becoming dismayed with the FBI’s response, Robertson emailed himself detailing the situation “should someone come looking.”
The following week, then-FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress saying the bureau is investigating additional emails that appeared relevant to the Clinton email case.
The book, written by Post reporter Devlin Barrett, is set to release Sept. 22.