Ex-Clinton spokesman: Warrant shows Comey’s moves ‘utterly unjustified’

A former spokesman to Hillary Clinton’s campaign on Tuesday blasted the FBI after the public release of a warrant used during the agency’s investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of State.

The document showed that “[FBI Director James] Comey’s intrusion on the election was as utterly unjustified as we suspected at time,” according to Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon.

The warrant — unsealed Tuesday — shows that investigators believed there was probable cause that a laptop seized as part of its investigation of former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) contained classified information pertinent to its then-closed probe into Clinton’s server.

{mosads}But the document provided few specifics. 

The bureau told a federal judge that some of the accounts used on the seized computer correlated with accounts used by Clinton and her aides during her tenure at Foggy Bottom — accounts that investigators had previously concluded had been used inappropriately, the newly released documents show.

That evidence was too thin to justify the FBI’s actions, according to Fallon.

“There was nothing in search warrant filing to controvert Comey’s statements from July and truly establish probable cause of a crime,” Fallon tweeted.

“Whenever Comey departs FBI, this episode will be in first graf of any assessment of his tenure. It is stain on his personal legacy & on FBI,” he said.

The lawyer who forced the opening of the documents has also criticized the strength of the evidence, saying he was “appalled.”  

“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” Clinton and longtime aide Huma Abedin, Randy Schoenberg said in a statement on Facebook.

It remains unclear, Schoenberg said, “why they thought they might find evidence of a crime, why they felt it necessary to inform Congress, and why they even sought this search warrant.”

Comey informed lawmakers of the discovery of the new emails days before the presidential election in a move that was falsely described as a “reopening” of the case by some Republicans.

The Clinton campaign has attributed her surprise loss in part to the eleventh-hour decision by Comey.

Investigators found emails they thought might be pertinent when they sorted and scanned the header information of messages stored on Weiner’s computer, according to the newly released warrant.

The former New York congressman was under investigation for allegedly sending sexually explicit messages to a minor. Weiner is married to Abedin, though the two are separated.

Critics hammered Comey’s vague letter — filed two days before the warrant was issued — for igniting a firestorm of speculation that the new emails contained a “smoking gun” without providing any substantive information for voters to judge.