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“Glitch!” FBI’s Three Leaked Claims about the Delay in Obtaining a Warrant for Huma’s Email

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The other day, the WSJ had a story that included this detail about the gap between the time FBI realized there were Huma Abedin emails on a computer seized in the Anthony Weiner investigation and when they got a warrant to read them.

The FBI had searched the computer while looking for child pornography, people familiar with the matter said, but the warrant they used didn’t give them authority to search for matters related to Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangement at the State Department. Mr. Weiner has denied sending explicit or indecent messages to the minor.

In their initial review of the laptop, the metadata showed many messages, apparently in the thousands, that were either sent to or from the private email server at Mrs. Clinton’s home that had been the focus of so much investigative effort for the FBI. Senior FBI officials decided to let the Weiner investigators proceed with a closer examination of the metadata on the computer, and report back to them.

At a meeting early last week of senior Justice Department and FBI officials, a member of the department’s senior national-security staff asked for an update on the Weiner laptop, the people familiar with the matter said. At that point, officials realized that no one had acted to obtain a warrant, these people said. [my emphasis]

While I and actual experts on Fourth Amendment law had already started asking about the legality of finding emails implicating Huma while searching a computer seized for an investigation into underage sexting, the revelation that FBI somehow forgot to get a warrant for two to three weeks raised even bigger questions.

In the last day, both the NYT and the WaPo have provided different explanations about it (though they use it to explain the time lapse between discovering the emails and informing Congress, not getting a warrant). The NYT reported that the FBI had to write custom software to be able to read Weiner’s emails without at the same time reading Huma’s.

The F.B.I. has not explained why three weeks passed between the time the bureau obtained the laptop and when Mr. Comey told Congress about it. After an F.B.I. computer analysis response team in New York copied the laptop’s hard drive, bureau employees began examining the information on the computer.

That is when agents realized that Ms. Abedin’s emails were on the laptop, but they did not have the authority to view them without a warrant.

The F.B.I. needed custom software to allow them to read Mr. Weiner’s emails without viewing hers. But building that program took two weeks, causing the delay. The program ultimately showed that there were thousands of Ms. Abedin’s emails on the laptop.

Mr. Comey was not briefed in full on a plan to read the emails until last Thursday, Oct. 27. He informed Congress the next day. F.B.I. lawyers then had to obtain a second warrant to look at Ms. Abedin’s emails, which happened last weekend. [my emphasis]

WaPo reported that “glitches” delayed the FBI in separating Weiner’s emails from Huma’s.

Although investigators had discovered the emails in early October, software glitches prevented them from separating Abedin-related emails from the hundreds of thousands of messages recovered until Oct. 19 or 20, according to people familiar with the case.

While Comey had been quickly alerted by his deputy to the original find, he took no further action, allowing agents in the field to get a better idea of the scope of the material. Agents could use digital clues to decipher where emails had originated and been sent but were legally barred from reading the emails without a search warrant because they had been obtained in a separate investigation.

When agents formally recommended on Oct. 27 that the warrant be sought, Comey agreed and then felt obligated to inform Congress — which he did with his letter the following day. Comey’s only reference in the letter to the timing of his involvement was that he had been briefed the previous day. [my emphasis]

Note NYT says Comey was not briefing on the plan to read the emails until October 27. WaPo says that he was in the loop before then, then consulted again on obtaining a warrant on October 27. Those aren’t necessarily conflicting stories — I guess it depends on what “a plan to read the emails” means — but I find the distinction curious.

The real batshit thing, though, is the claim that the nation’s premiere law enforcement agency didn’t have a way to sift out Weiner’s emails from Huma’s, something even garden variety cops have to do every day. Equally batshit is the claim they created a new piece of software to do so. Glitches? That’s a word national security people use as a cover story.

There is no good explanation for why the FBI didn’t have the technical means to do this. There is even less of an explanation for why, in a case involving such high profile people, the FBI would be struggling with “glitches.”

Which leaves us where we were with WSJ’s story: The FBI was fiddling with these emails for 3 weeks before “officials realized that no one had acted to obtain a warrant.” And yet somehow, the FBI was able to show probable cause that these emails had some tie to a crime.

I do hope this is something Patrick Leahy insists on getting answers on, because the story stinks.

Anthony Weiner Creates a Virgin Birth for Evidence the Clinton Foundation Investigators Want

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WSJ’s Devlin Barrett has a long story he describes as laying bare “tensions that have built for months inside the bureau and the Justice Department over how to investigate someone who could soon be elected president.” It might just as well be described as a catalogue of the ways FBI has gotten out of control.

To show the important background to the decision to get a warrant to access Huma Abedin’s email, I’m going to switch the order of the story from that Barrett uses. Looked at in this way, it becomes clear that by accessing Huma’s email, the FBI may not just have renewed the probably fruitless investigation into Hillary’s email server, but also found a way to access Huma’s emails for use in an investigation of the Clinton Foundation.

FBI ignores Public Integrity orders not to escalate the investigation of the Clinton Foundation

After laying out the recent decision to access Huma Abedin’s email (which I deal with below), Barrett confirms what Comey made obvious with a “neither confirm nor deny” response at his July testimony before the House Oversight Committee (though a flood of leaks had long claimed such an investigation existed).

The FBI has been investigating the Clinton Foundation for over a year.

As Barrett describes it, the case arose because Agents were seeing if a crime was committed, not because they had found evidence that it had:

Early this year, four FBI field offices—New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Ark.—were collecting information about the Clinton Foundation to see if there was evidence of financial crimes or influence-peddling, according to people familiar with the matter.

He describes that in February, when Andrew McCabe got promoted to Deputy Director, he took over oversight of this investigation. (In an earlier article Barrett insinuated that an earlier Terry McAuliffe donation to McCabe’s wife’s state senate campaign presented a conflict, but in this article Barrett provides McAuliffe’s explanation for the donation.) Also in February — Barrett doesn’t say whether McCabe was involved — investigative teams located in Los Angeles, DC, Little Rock, and New York (he doesn’t say whether they were in EDNY or SDNY or both, which is relevant to a later development in the story) presented their case to DOJ’s Public Integrity (PIN) section.

Here’s how Barrett describes that meeting:

Some said that is because the FBI didn’t present compelling evidence to justify more aggressive pursuit of the Clinton Foundation, and that the career anticorruption prosecutors in the room simply believed it wasn’t a very strong case. Others said that from the start, the Justice Department officials were stern, icy and dismissive of the case.

“That was one of the weirdest meetings I’ve ever been to,” one participant told others afterward, according to people familiar with the matter.

Anticorruption prosecutors at the Justice Department told the FBI at the meeting they wouldn’t authorize more aggressive investigative techniques, such as subpoenas, formal witness interviews, or grand-jury activity. But the FBI officials believed they were well within their authority to pursue the leads and methods already under way, these people said.

Mind you, seven paragraphs before describing PIN telling the FBI it would not authorize subpoenas, Barrett described the Los Angeles team having “issued some subpoenas for bank records related to the foundation.” So when he says FBI officials believed they could pursue leads and methods already under way, it may mean they decided they could use the fruit of subpoenas PIN subsequently judged weren’t merited by the evidence.

In July, after DOJ decided not to prosecute anyone on the email server and Comey started blabbing (including his non-denial of the existence of this investigation), FBI “sought to refocus the Clinton Foundation probe,” which sounds a lot like redoubling efforts to find something to investigate Hillary for. (Note, this entire article makes no mention of the June Supreme Court decision throwing out much of former VA governor Bob McDonnell’s conviction, which would have significantly raised the bar for any prosecution of the Clinton Foundation.) McCabe bracketed the DC work focusing on Terry McAuliffe, from which he was recused, and put NY in charge of the rest.

Barrett spends a paragraph airing both sides of a dispute about whether that was the right decision, then describes a (male, and therefore someone besides Loretta Lynch or Sally Yates) senior DOJ official bitching out McCabe for continuing to pursue the Clinton Foundation investigation, especially during the election.

According to a person familiar with the probes, on Aug. 12, a senior Justice Department official called Mr. McCabe to voice his displeasure at finding that New York FBI agents were still openly pursuing the Clinton Foundation probe during the election season. Mr. McCabe said agents still had the authority to pursue the issue as long as they didn’t use overt methods requiring Justice Department approvals.

The Justice Department official was “very pissed off,” according to one person close to Mr. McCabe, and pressed him to explain why the FBI was still chasing a matter the department considered dormant.

Barrett spends several paragraphs airing both sides of what happened next, whether FBI agents were ordered to stand down entirely or whether McCabe said they could continue to investigate within the existing guidelines.

FBI attempts to venue shop to get at Clinton server emails

Even after that order, the Clinton Foundation investigators tried to get more — specifically, all the emails turned over in the email server investigation. When EDNY (as a reminder, that’s where Loretta Lynch was until last year US Attorney) refused, the investigators asked to go get them in SDNY.

In September, agents on the foundation case asked to see the emails contained on nongovernment laptops that had been searched as part of the Clinton email case, but that request was rejected by prosecutors at the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn. Those emails were given to the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information.

Some FBI agents were dissatisfied with that answer, and asked for permission to make a similar request to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. McCabe, these people said, told them no and added that they couldn’t “go prosecutor-shopping.”

Several comments on this: First, McCabe did the right thing here in refusing to let his agents venue shop until they got their way. I hope he would do the same in a less visible investigation where senior DOJ officials were chewing him out for conducting the investigation in the first place.

Second, consider how the timing of this coincides with both leaks about the immunity agreements, Jason Chaffetz’ inquiry into the same, and two sets of email server related materials. As one key example, on October 5, just weeks after McCabe told his Agents they couldn’t go “prosecutor-shopping” to get to the emails released in the email server probe, Republicans were releasing details of their in camera review of the terms of the immunity agreements used to deny the Clinton Foundation investigations access to the emails. We should assume that some entities within the FBI are using all angles, using Chaffetz’ investigations to publicize decisions that have thwarted their investigation.

Did FBI Agents review the content of Huma Abedin’s email without a warrant?

So sometime in September, the Clinton foundation team was told they couldn’t have emails associated with the server investigation that were tied to immunity agreements. On October 3 (per the NYT), FBI agents seized a number of devices, including a laptop used jointly by Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin with a warrant permitting just the investigation of Weiner’s alleged sexting of an underaged woman (curiously, Barrett says they were permitted to look for child porn). Shortly thereafter, they found found emails from accounts, plural, of Huma Abedin on the laptop. Multiple reports suggest those emails may be duplicative of the ones that FBI had just been told they couldn’t access because of the immunity agreements tied to other devices.

There’s no reason to believe FBI found those potentially duplicative emails because they were prohibited from accessing the ones turned over voluntarily as part of the email server probe (in any case, they are presented as different investigative teams, although the description of this sprawling Clinton Foundation investigation may explain why earlier leaks said 147 people were part of the Clinton investigation); it’s just one of those coinkydinks that seem to plague the Clintons.

At that point, per Barrett, “Senior FBI officials decided to let the Weiner investigators proceed with a closer examination of the metadata on the computer, and report back to them.” Early last week (so two or three weeks later), some asked how that weeks-long review of the Huma emails (allegedly just the metadata) was going.

“At that point, officials realized that no one had acted to obtain a warrant, these people said.”

In other words, for several weeks, FBI has been nosing around those emails without court authorization to do so in conjunction with the email server investigation (which may or may not have been formally closed). If they really stuck to metadata, that’s no big deal under Third Party rules. If they did peek — even at subject lines — then that may be a bigger problem.

Only then did the Weiner investigators compare notes with the Hillary investigators and decide the emails were relevant. Barrett doesn’t answer the obvious question: how did the Weiner investigators determine these emails might be relevant and did they really just review only metadata? Given all the stories to FBI friendly sources claiming Comey — and implying no one — has seen the content of the email, I suspect the answer is Weiner investigators went beyond metadata.

The background Barrett provides gives more significance to FBI’s decision to (perhaps belatedly) obtain a warrant to get Huma’s email and to Comey’s highly inappropriate magnification of it. Not only have they reopened (or renewed — reports on this are still all over the map on this point) the email investigation, but they’ve also created a virgin birth for emails that the Clinton foundation investigators tried — and were willing to venue shop — but failed to get.

FBI leaking has neutralized DOJ’s control over the Bureau

This story shows that FBI has tried a number of methods to defy PIN advice to drop the investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

I don’t know whether the investigation into the Clinton Foundation has merit or not (though given Barrett’s explanation, it does seem that some in FBI were looking for a crime rather than looking to solve one).

But I do know that if FBI agents operate outside of bounds on their power, they constitute a grave threat to the rule of law.

And Barrett’s article suggests at least three ways they appear to have done just that:

  • Fiddling with investigative guidelines of the DIOG (by using subpoenas without the appropriate level of investigation and authority)
  • Attempting to venue shop to get permission to access evidence they were told they couldn’t have
  • Leaking promiscuously, in clear violation of the rules, to bring political pressure including on Comey to conduct an investigation their supervisors had told them to either limit or halt

That promiscuous leaking, of course, includes this article, which relied on a great number of sources, almost none of whom should be speaking about this investigation. Don’t get me wrong — it’s great reporting on Barrett’s part. But it also serves the purpose of airing the claim that McCabe, PIN, and DOJ generally have thwarted an investigation into the Clinton Foundation that some at FBI believe has merit.

In addition, I’ve got questions about whether they read Huma’s email when they were supposed to just be looking at metadata.

Whatever else Comey’s totally inappropriate behavior reflects, his justification for doing so because it otherwise might leak suggests he doesn’t have control over his agency. Though given his coy response to Chaffetz in July, I do wonder whether he isn’t rooting for the Clinton foundation investigation to proceed; whatever else he is, Comey is a master of using the press to win political fights.

And remember, the FBI (under Comey) has undermined one of the few irreproachable entities that might fix this sorry state of affairs. It has refused, now backed by an OLC opinion, to give DOJ’s Inspector General the unfettered right to investigate things like grand jury proceedings (though given that no grand jury was used in these cases, it might be harder to keep them out here). So if Patrick Leahy were to ask Michael Horowitz to investigate whether FBI acted inappropriately in these related investigations — and he should! — FBI might be able to withhold information from the IG.

A bunch of people who have unquestioned faith in the goodness of DOJ — now including Eric Holder, the guy who couldn’t prosecute a single criminal bank — have been, rightly, scolding Comey for his actions. But they have largely remained utterly silent about the runaway agents at the FBI, both about their obvious leaking and now about their efforts to sustain this investigation in defiance of at least some of the chain of command, including career prosecutors who should be fairly insulated from any political influence that someone like Lynch might respond to.

As I said, I’m agnostic about the investigation of the Clinton Foundation. I’m not agnostic on the importance of keeping FBI firmly within the bureaucratic bounds that prevents them from acting as an abusive force.

They seem to have surpassed those bounds.

The Story About Judicial Dysfunction Behind the Comey Whiplash

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I’ve been home from Europe for less than a day and already I’m thinking of sporting a neck collar for the whiplash I’ve gotten watching the wildly varying Jim Comey opinions.

I’m speaking, of course, of the response to Jim Comey’s highly unusual announcement to sixteen Chairs and Ranking Members of congressional committees (at least some of which Comey did not testify to) that the investigative team — presumably on the Clinton case — briefed him Thursday that FBI discovered additional emails in an unrelated case — now known to be the investigation into Anthony Weiner allegedly sexting a 15 year old — and he approved their request to take the steps necessary to be able to review those emails.

Effectively, the Weiner investigators, in reviewing the content from devices seized in that investigation, found emails from Huma Abedin, told the Hillary investigative team, and they’re now obtaining a warrant to be able to review those emails.

So of course the Republicans that had been claiming Comey had corruptly fixed the investigation for Hillary immediately started proclaiming his valor and Democrats that had been pointing confidently to his exoneration of Hillary immediately resumed their criticism of his highly unusual statements on this investigation. Make up your minds, people!

For the record, I think his initial, completely inappropriate statements made this inevitable. He excuses Friday’s statement as formally correcting the record of his testimony. The claim is undermined by the fact that not all recipients of the letter had him testify. But I think once you start the process of blabbing about investigations, more blabbing likely follows. I don’t mean to excuse this disclosure, but the real sin comes in the first one, which was totally inappropriate by any measure. I’m also very unsympathetic with the claim —  persistently offered by people who otherwise cheer Comey — that he released his initial statement to help Loretta Lynch out of the jam created by her inappropriate meeting with Bill Clinton; I think those explanations stem from a willful blindness about what a self-righteous moralist Comey is.

Of course I’ve been critical of Comey since long before it was cool (and our late great commenter Mary Perdue was critical years before that).

But I’d like to take a step back and talk about what this says about our judicial system.

Jim Comey doesn’t play by the rules

Jamie Gorelick (who worked with Comey when she was in DOJ) and Larry Thompson (who worked with Comey when Comey was US Attorney and he was Deputy Attorney General, until Comey replaced him) wrote a scathing piece attacking Comey for violating the long-standing prohibition on doing anything in an investigation pertaining to a political candidate in the 60 days leading up to an election. The op-ed insinuates that Comey is a “self-aggrandizing crusader[] on [a] high horse” before it goes on to slam him for making himself the judge on both the case and Hillary’s actions.

James B. Comey, put himself enthusiastically forward as the arbiter of not only whether to prosecute a criminal case — which is not the job of the FBI — but also best practices in the handling of email and other matters. Now, he has chosen personally to restrike the balance between transparency and fairness, departing from the department’s traditions. As former deputy attorney general George Terwilliger aptly put it, “There’s a difference between being independent and flying solo.”

But the real meat is that there’s a rule against statements like the one Comey made, and Comey broke it.

Decades ago, the department decided that in the 60-day period before an election, the balance should be struck against even returning indictments involving individuals running for office, as well as against the disclosure of any investigative steps. The reasoning was that, however important it might be for Justice to do its job, and however important it might be for the public to know what Justice knows, because such allegations could not be adjudicated, such actions or disclosures risked undermining the political process. A memorandum reflecting this choice has been issued every four years by multiple attorneys general for a very long time, including in 2016.

If Comey is willing to break this rule in such a high profile case, then what other rules is he breaking? What other judgements has Comey made himself arbiter of? Particularly given Comey’s persistent discussion of FBI’s work in terms of “good guys” and “bad guys” — as opposed to criminal behavior — that seems a really pertinent question.

As with James Clapper, Loretta Lynch can’t control Comey

Gorelick (who has been suggested among potential Clinton appointees) and Thompson go easier on Lynch, however, noting that she didn’t order him to stand down here, but ultimately blaming Comey for needing to be ordered.

Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch — nominally Comey’s boss — has apparently been satisfied with advising Comey but not ordering him to abide by the rules. She, no doubt, did not want to override the FBI director in such a highly political matter, but she should not have needed to. He should have abided by the policy on his own.

But since John Cornyn confronted Lynch in March about who would make decisions in this case — “Everyone in the Department of Justice works for me, including the FBI, sir,” Lynch forcefully reminded Cornyn — it has been clear that there’s a lot more tension than the org chart would suggest there should be.

The NYT provides more details on how much tension there is.

The day before the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, sent a letter to Congress announcing that new evidence had been discovered that might be related to the completed Hillary Clinton email investigation, the Justice Department strongly discouraged the step and told him that he would be breaking with longstanding policy, three law enforcement officials said on Saturday.

Senior Justice Department officials did not move to stop him from sending the letter, officials said, but they did everything short of it, pointing to policies against talking about current criminal investigations or being seen as meddling in elections.

And it’s not just Lynch that has problems managing FBI.

In a response to a question from me in 2014 (after 56:00), Bob Litt explained that FBI’s dual role creates “a whole lot of complications” and went on to admit that the office of Director of National Intelligence — which is supposed to oversee the intelligence community — doesn’t oversee the FBI as directly.

Because FBI is part of the Department of Justice, I don’t have the same visibility into oversight there than I do with respect to the NSA, but the problems are much more complicated because of the dual functions of the FBI.

Litt said something similar to me in May when we discussed why FBI can continue to present bogus numbers in its legally mandated NSL reporting.

Now these are separate issues (though the Clinton investigation is, after all, a national security investigation into whether she or her aides mishandled classified information). But if neither the DNI nor the AG really has control over the FBI Director, it creates a real void of accountability that has repercussions for a whole lot of issues and, more importantly, people who don’t have the visibility or power of Hillary Clinton.

The FBI breaks the rules all the time by leaking like a sieve

Underlying this entire controversy is another rule that DOJ and FBI claim to abide by but don’t, at all: FBI is not supposed to reveal details of ongoing investigations.

Indeed, according to the NYT, Comey pointed to the certainty that this would leak to justify his Friday letter.

But although Mr. Comey told Congress this summer that the Clinton investigation was complete, he believed that if word of the new emails leaked out — and it was sure to leak out, he concluded — he risked being accused of misleading Congress and the public ahead of an election, colleagues said.

Yet the US Attorney’s Manual, starting with this language on prejudicial information and continuing into several more clauses, makes it clear that these kinds of leaks are impermissible.

At no time shall any component or personnel of the Department of Justice furnish any statement or information that he or she knows or reasonably should know will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing an adjudicative proceeding.

Comey, the boss of all the FBI Agents investigating this case, had another alternative, one he should have exercised months ago when it was clear those investigating this case were leaking promiscuously: demand that they shut up, conduct investigations of who was leaking, and discipline those who were doing so. Those leaks were already affecting election year concerns, but there has been little commentary about how they, too, break DOJ rules.

But instead of trying to get FBI Agents to follow DOJ guidelines, Comey instead decided to violate them himself.

Again, that’s absolutely toxic when discussing an investigation that might affect the presidential election, but FBI’s habitual blabbing is equally toxic for a bunch of less powerful people whose investigative details get leaked by the FBI all the time.

[Update: Jeffrey Toobin addresses the role of leaks more generally here, though he seems to forget that the Hillary investigation is technically a national security investigation. I think it’s important to remember that, especially given Hillary’s campaign focus on why FBI isn’t leaking about the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia, which would also be a national security investigation.]

Warrantless back door searches do tremendous amounts of damage

Finally, think about the circumstances of the emails behind this latest disclosure.

Reports are currently unclear how much the FBI knows about these emails. The NYT describes that the FBI seized multiple devices in conjunction with the Weiner investigation, including the laptop on which they found these emails.

On Oct. 3, F.B.I. agents seized several electronic devices from Mr. Weiner: a laptop, his iPhone and an iPad that was in large measure used by his 4-year-old son to watch cartoons, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Days later, F.B.I. agents also confiscated a Wi-Fi router that could identify any other devices that had been used, the person said.

While searching the laptop, the agents discovered the existence of tens of thousands of emails, some of them sent between Ms. Abedin and other Clinton aides, according to senior law enforcement officials. It is not clear if Ms. Abedin downloaded the emails to the laptop or if they were automatically backed up there. The emails dated back years, the officials said. Ms. Abedin has testified that she did not routinely delete her emails.

Presumably, the warrant to seize those devices permits the FBI agents to go find any evidence of Weiner sexting women (or perhaps just the young woman in question).

And admittedly, the details NYT’s sources describe involve just metadata: addressing information and dates.

But then, Comey told Congress these emails were “pertinent” to the Clinton investigation, and other details in reports, such as they might be duplicates of emails already reviewed by the FBI, suggest the Weiner investigators may have seen enough to believe they might pertain to the inquiry into whether Clinton and her aides (including Huma) mishandled classified information. Moreover, the FBI at least thinks they will be able to prove there is probable cause to believe these emails may show the mishandling of classified information.

Similarly, there are conflicting stories about whether the Hillary investigation was ever closed, which may arise from the fact that if it were (as Comey had suggested in his first blabby statements), seeking these emails would require further approval to continue the investigation.

The point, though, is that FBI would have had no idea these emails existed were it not for FBI investigators who were aware of the other investigation alerting their colleagues to these emails. This has been an issue of intense litigation in recent years, and I’d love for Huma, after the election, to submit a serious legal challenge if any warrant is issued.

But then, in this case, Huma is being provided far more protection than people swept up in FISA searches, where any content with a target can be searched years into the future without any probable cause or even evidence of wrong-doing. Here, Huma’s emails won’t be accessible for investigative purpose without a warrant (in part because of recent prior litigation in the 2nd Circuit), whereas in the case of emails acquired via FISA, FBI can access the information — pulling it up not just by metadata but by content — with no warrant at all.

[Update: Orin Kerr shares my concerns on this point — with the added benefit that he discusses all the recent legal precedents that may prohibit accessing these emails.]

This is a good example of the cost of such investigations. Because the FBI can and does sweep so widely in searches of electronic communications, evidence from one set of data collection can be used to taint others unrelated to the crime under investigation.

All the people writing scathing emails about Comey’s behavior in this particular matter would like you to believe that this issue doesn’t reflect on larger issues at DOJ. They would like you to believe that DOJ was all pure and good and FBI was well-controlled except for this particular investigation. But that’s simply not the case, and some of these issues go well beyond Comey.

Update: Minor changes were made to this post after it was initially posted.

Turki al-Faisal Picked the Wrong Day to Make Veto Threats

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From everything I know, Saudi Prince and former Intelligence Chief Turki al-Faisal is incredibly shrewd. And I believe Saudi Arabia has already started to make the kind of strategic realignments he threatens in his op-ed threatening consequences if the US vetoes Palestinian’s bid for statedhood at the UN Security Council.

The United States must support the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations this month or risk losing the little credibility it has in the Arab world. If it does not, American influence will decline further, Israeli security will be undermined and Iran will be empowered, increasing the chances of another war in the region.

Moreover, Saudi Arabia would no longer be able to cooperate with America in the same way it historically has. With most of the Arab world in upheaval, the “special relationship” between Saudi Arabia and the United States would increasingly be seen as toxic by the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims, who demand justice for the Palestinian people.

Saudi leaders would be forced by domestic and regional pressures to adopt a far more independent and assertive foreign policy. Like our recent military support for Bahrain’s monarchy, which America opposed, Saudi Arabia would pursue other policies at odds with those of the United States, including opposing the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Iraq and refusing to open an embassy there despite American pressure to do so. The Saudi government might part ways with Washington in Afghanistan and Yemen as well.

The reason why this threat wouldn’t work even if supporting Israel unquestioningly weren’t already a third rail of our politics has to do with NY-9, Anthony Weiner’s congressional seat.By all appearances, Democrats are going to suffer an embarrassing loss there tomorrow. And while pollsters offer mixed messages about its true impact on the race, the Republican, Bob Turner, has made real efforts to suggest Obama is anti-Israel.

One surprise in Siena’s polling, however, is the relative importance of Israel to the race. Turner has made it an absolutely critical issue for his campaign, slamming Obama’s stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at every turn in an effort to win over Jewish voters in the district. Weprin, an Orthodox Jew, has a similar position on Israel but Turner has argued that unless he breaks with Obama entirely and refuses to endorse him, he’s still tainted.

But according to the numbers, it may be less of a factor than it seems.

“I don’t see it at all,” Greenberg said, when asked about the “Israel effect.”

Siena asked voters to pick from five options to explain their vote, including the candidate’s party, position on Social Security and Medicare, whether they were endorsed by a trusted source, their position on economic issues, and finally their position on Israel. Only 7% of voters picked Israel, including just 16% of Jewish voters.

That may not be the whole story, however: Weprin’s lead with Jewish voters has collapsed from 21 to 6 in the last month. It’s roughly in line with the total 12% drop among voters overall, but may be more complicated to tease out. Jensen, for his part, doesn’t want to make any conclusions on the Israel issue without seeing more detailed results first.

Between our sure veto of Palestine’s efforts at the UNSC and the increasingly dangerous squabble between Turkey and Israel, not to mention increasing tensions between Egypt and Israel, Obama ought to attempt a grand bargain to foster peace in the Middle East.

But it’s not going to happen.