Investigators get go-ahead to scrutinize newfound Clinton email cache

WASHINGTON — Federal investigators have obtained a warrant to begin searching a large cache of emails belonging to a top aide to Hillary Clinton, law enforcement officials said Sunday, as prosecutors and FBI agents scrambled under intense public pressure to assess their significance before Election Day.

It remains unclear whether they can finish their work by then. "The process has begun," a federal law enforcement official said.

The hurried pace at the Justice Department and FBI raises the prospect that law enforcement officials will again publicly discuss a continuing investigation involving a presidential candidate in the final days of the campaign. The FBI director, James Comey, has faced extraordinary criticism since he sent an ambiguous letter to congressional leaders telling them that agents had discovered new emails.

Agents in an unrelated investigation of Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman, found the emails, belonging to his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, the aide to Clinton, this month. That prompted a renewed interest among agents who had investigated Clinton for her use of a private email server as secretary of state. That investigation centered on whether Clinton or her aides had mishandled classified information. Prosecutors concluded that case in July without bringing charges.

A federal law enforcement official said agents had discovered hundreds of thousands of emails on Weiner's computer, but investigators expected to examine only part of the total. Agents will have probable cause to search only the messages related to the Clinton investigation. Some of Abedin's emails passed through Clinton's private server, officials said, which means there is a high likelihood that the FBI has already read them.

Officials cautioned that there was no evidence to date that changed the Justice Department's conclusion that neither Clinton nor her aides should be charged. They said it was possible that the review would turn up nothing, but said investigators felt obligated to check.

Comey has faced widespread criticism since his announcement Friday, and senior Justice Department and FBI officials have been under tremendous pressure to review the emails quickly and assess their importance. Both Clinton and her Republican rival, Donald Trump, have called for the FBI to say publicly what it knows before Election Day.

The Clinton campaign kept up the pressure on Comey on Sunday by releasing a letter signed by nearly 100 former senior Justice Department officials who sharply criticized the FBI director. Among the officials who signed the letter was former Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., with whom Comey often clashed before Holder left office in 2015.

Over the weekend, senior Justice Department officials, some of whom advised Comey not to make a public announcement about the emails, said that they would make all resources available to conduct the investigation as quickly as possible, and that the timing of the letter — just days before the election — gave the matter an unprecedented urgency.

Late Friday and early Saturday, law enforcement officials said there was no chance the email review could be completed before Election Day. By Sunday, officials said they would spare no resources in the investigation and try to determine whether the new emails changed the Justice Department's conclusion not to charge Clinton or her aides.

The emails will be reviewed by the same counterintelligence team in Washington that handled the Clinton investigation from the beginning. The review will focus on whether there is evidence in the emails that Abedin mishandled classified information or impeded the FBI's original email investigation.

Investigators will also want to know whether the new trove includes messages that Abedin did not turn over to the FBI months ago. Abedin has said she did not routinely delete emails, and people close to her said she did not know these emails were on Weiner's computers. It is not clear how they got there, but it is possible they were automatically backed up.

The Justice Department efforts were described by three federal law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.

The FBI knew weeks ago that its investigation into whether Weiner sent illicit text messages to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina had the potential to reignite the Clinton case. After agents seized Weiner's laptop, phone and tablet on Oct. 3, they quickly learned the computer contained a trove of Abedin's emails.

The assistant FBI director in charge of the New York field office then notified the deputy director in Washington about the discovery, according to one senior law enforcement official. Agents in the Weiner case were not allowed to widely search Abedin's emails, but were told to conduct a cursory review of the metadata — the "to" and "from" information on each message — to see if any of the emails could be relevant to the Clinton investigation.

Once it became clear that the emails were potentially significant, lawyers at the Justice Department and FBI conducted a legal analysis of how to proceed, officials said. Because Abedin's emails were not directly related to the investigation of her husband, criminal agents could neither read the contents of the emails nor pass them to their colleagues in Washington.

Late last week, the authorities decided to seek a search warrant to examine the emails. Comey's letter gave that effort a tremendous sense of urgency. Suddenly, a follow-up inquiry that was expected to take weeks or months now needed to be rushed before Election Day.

Comey's letter also opened him up to criticism from Democrats that he seemed willing to disclose every investigative wrinkle related to the Clinton investigation, but has not said anything about the scope of an FBI investigation into Russian meddling in U.S. elections. Democrats have repeatedly asked the FBI to investigate Trump and his aides as part of that case. Comey has never said if he would.

Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, increased the pressure on Comey late Sunday, criticizing the director for a "disturbing double standard."

"In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers and the Russian government," Reid wrote in a letter to Comey. "The public has a right to know this information."

It was unclear what Reid was referring to. A spokesman said in a telephone interview Sunday that Reid did not believe it was his place to disclose national security information, which had been told to him in confidential briefings with senior intelligence and law enforcement officials.

"The exact information is at the discretion of the national security community, but it is Sen. Reid's view that there is much more that can be said publicly than has been so far," said the spokesman, Adam Jentleson.

Comey and his allies have defended his handling of the Clinton case, calling the circumstances "exceptional."

Though Justice Department guidelines discourage making public comments about continuing investigations or doing anything that could influence an election, Comey has said he believed that he was obligated to reveal the existence of the new emails. Not telling Congress, he told colleagues, would have opened up the FBI up to criticism and created a cloud that would have hung over the bureau for years.

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting from New York.