Clinton lawyer blasts FBI after judge unseals search warrant in email probe

Hillary Clinton's camp blasted FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday (20 December) after the search warrant obtained by the FBI to investigate a laptop they claimed was connected to Clinton's use of a private email server was released.

Clinton's camp argues that the search warrant shows that Comey's "intrusion" just days before the presidential election was "utterly unjustified".

Clinton's attorney, David Kendall, said that the FBI acted inappropriately when it announced it had resumed the previously closed investigation into Clinton's email set-up. The remarks came after a federal court in Manhattan released the documents relating to the FBI's October search warrant.

The search warrant was issued two days after Comey wrote to Congress, on 28 October, that newly discovered emails appeared to be "pertinent" to the FBI's investigation, Newsweek noted.

The letter, which was made public, shook the Clinton campaign in the final two weeks of the election. Clinton has subsequently blamed Comey, and the letter, for her surprising loss to Republican Donald Trump.

According to Newsweek, in the affidavit unsealed on Tuesday, an FBI agent claimed there was "probable cause" to believe that emails connected to Clinton were among the "thousands" found on a laptop belonging to former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, which was being reviewed in an unrelated probe. Weiner is the estranged husband of longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

However, the documents did not show that the FBI had evidence at the time of Comey's letter that any of those emails included classified communications with Clinton. Kendall said Comey's letter "produced devastating but predictable damage politically ... which was both legally unauthorised and factually unnecessary".

The documents were unsealed following a Freedom of Information request by Los Angeles-based lawyer Randol Schoenberg. In a statement, the attorney said he saw "nothing to suggest that there would be anything other than routine correspondence between Secretary Clinton and her longtime aide, Huma Abedin".

In an email to USA Today, Schoenberg said he was "appalled". He added that remained unclear "... 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".

Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon took to Twitter to take a shot at Comey, writing that the "unsealed filings regarding Huma's emails reveal Comey's intrusion on the election was as utterly unjustified as we suspected at the time".

On 19 December, former president Bill Clinton said that Trump had won the election due to outside interference, The New York Times reported. "She prevailed against everything but, at the end, we had the Russians and the FBI, and she couldn't prevail against that," he said.