Search Warrant For Hillary Clinton's Emails On Anthony Weiner's Laptop Released

The warrant that the FBI used to further investigate a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner in connection with its investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server was made public on Tuesday.

The 21 pages of partially redacted documents related to the search and seizure of Weiner's laptop provide a closer look at the contentious decisions made by the FBI in the days leading up to the election.

The FBI was already in possession of the laptop because of its investigation into Weiner, the former U.S. congressman who reportedly sexted with an underage girl. During that search, the bureau discovered emails on the laptop between Clinton and Huma Abedin — Weiner's estranged wife and a top aide to Clinton.

Because the FBI knew Abedin had exchanged classified information with Clinton, the bureau had to search the emails found on Weiner's laptop.

“The subject laptop was never authorized for the storage or transmission of classified or national defense information,” the affidavit said.

“A complete forensic analysis and review of the subject laptop will also allow the FBI to determine if there is any evidence of computer intrusion into the subject laptop and to determine if classified information was accessed by unauthorized users or transferred to any other unauthorized systems.”

The warrant was issued on Oct. 30, two days after FBI Director James Comey's letter to Congress announcing the new developments in the investigation rocked the presidential race during its final days.

Two days before the election, Comey said that the new investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing, but gleeful Republicans and a hungry news media had given the new developments wall-to-wall treatment.

Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said Tuesday that the new information showed that Comey's letter and its release was "utterly unjustified."

Clinton and some of her aides have blamed her election loss to Donald Trump in part on Comey's letter and criticized his decision to make the FBI's findings public at all.

“Swing-state voters made their decisions in the final days breaking against me because of the F.B.I. letter from Director Comey,” Clinton told a group of donors in Manhattan last week.

E. Randol Schoenberg, the Los Angeles-based attorney who sued to have the documents released, said in a statement that he saw no probable cause in the search warrant's application.

“I see nothing at all in the search warrant application that would give rise to probable cause, nothing that would make anyone suspect that there was anything on the laptop beyond what the FBI had already searched and determined not to be evidence of a crime, nothing to suggest that there would be anything other than routine correspondence between Secretary Clinton and her longtime aide Huma Abedin,” he said in the statement, which was sent to multiple news outlets.

You can read the full warrant and other documents that were released Tuesday, which were posted by Politico, below:

This story will be updated.

Image via Gage Skidmore, Flickr, used under Creative Commons