State Dept. releases Abedin emails found on Weiner's laptop
At least four memos were labeled classified, but not from a government server; Ellison Barber has the latest developments for 'Special Report.'
The State Department on Friday released a batch of work-related emails from the account of top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin that were discovered by the FBI on a laptop belonging to Abedin's estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign.
At least four of the documents released Friday are marked "classified."
One November 2010 document that was released shows Abedin forwarding an email to an address titled “Anthony Campaign.”
Former FBI Director James Comey said during a congressional hearing earlier this year that he believed Abedin regularly forwarded emails to Weiner for him to print out so she could give them to Clinton.
Comey famously said in July 2016 that Clinton was “extremely careless” in her handling of classified emails on a private server.
That 2010 email was a “callsheet” to Clinton about her upcoming call to Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal to warn about an imminent leak of U.S. diplomatic cables -- so-called Cablegate -- from WikiLeaks.
The rest of the document is redacted and marked classified as of August 2015.
Abedin is a longtime aide to Clinton who worked at the State Department and on Clinton’s campaign.
The emails indicate that Clinton was still invested in party politics despite her cabinet position. In one April 2011 email, Abedin informs her that Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz had been selected as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.
“Is she leaving the Congress?” Clinton replied.
It also shows Abedin in her role as Clinton’s gatekeeper.
“Love when people send her schedule stuff direct,” Abedin sarcastically wrote in an email to a colleague in December 2011, after someone emailed Clinton directly to ask her to speak at a conference.
At the time of the emails, Abedin was married to Weiner, a onetime Democratic congressman who began a 21-month prison sentence last month after being convicted of sexting a 15-year-old girl.
Abedin has since filed for divorce.
The Abedin emails jolted the 2016 presidential race after Comey told Congress just days before the election that FBI agents had found more of Clinton’s messages.
The emails were found on Weiner’s laptop, as the FBI investigated its sexting case against him.
The discovery of the records reopened the case against Clinton several months after Comey said he wasn’t recommending any charges be filed in the case.
HUMA ABEDIN'S COUSIN CONVICTED IN FRAUD CASE INVOLVING FAKE EMAILS
The conservative group Judicial Watch filed suit against the State Department for all official department emails sent or received by Abedin on a non-state.gov email address.
“This is a major victory,” the group’s president, Tom Fitton, said in a Friday statement. “After years of hard work in federal court, Judicial Watch has forced the State Department to finally allow Americans to see these public documents.”
Fitton added, “That these government docs were on Anthony Weiner’s laptop dramatically illustrates the need for the Justice Department to finally do a serious investigation of Hillary Clinton’s and Huma Abedin’s obvious violations of law.”
Fox News’ Bill Mears and Kellianne Jones contributed to this report.
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