INQUISITR.COM / News & Politics

Hillary Clinton Emails: How The FBI Investigated 650,000 Emails In A Week

By Kris Holt
Published on: 16:27 PST, Nov 6, 2016

On Sunday, it looked for at least a moment that the FBI put to an end the scandal surrounding the Hillary Clinton emails found on a computer connected to one of her aides.

But critics, including Donald Trump, quickly raised questions over how exactly the FBI was able to examine allegedly 650,000 emails in a little over a week to determine that there was no wrongdoing. To manually read those messages and verify that they included no classified secrets would mean that federal agents would need to review approximately one email per second.

Trouble is, the world has these things called computers now, and those newfangled things can perform much of the heavy lifting in such an investigation.

On October 28, 11 days before the general election, FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress explaining that the bureau had discovered emails connected to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, as the Inquisitr previously reported. The FBI found the messages on a computer belonging to Anthony Weiner, husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin, as part of a separate criminal investigation.

Comey sent the letter admittedly without knowing what was in the Hillary Clinton emails, leading to criticism suggesting he was interfering with the election.

However, on Sunday, Comey sent a second letter to Congress, explaining that the FBI found no incriminating details in these new emails, as the Inquisitr reported. As such, he said the bureau was standing by its July decision to not recommend charges against Clinton over the use of a private email server during her time as Secretary of State.

According to Politico, Republican presidential nominee Trump claimed at a rally Sunday that it was impossible for the FBI to examine all of the 650,000 emails and clear Clinton of any wrongdoing in nine days.

“You can’t review 650,000 emails in eight days. You can’t do it, folks. Hillary Clinton is guilty. […] The investigations into her crimes will go on for a long, long time.”

But the FBI did not have to read 650,000 emails. As Comey said in his letter to Congress Sunday, the FBI reviewed “all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State” that they found on Abedin’s account.

It’s highly unlikely there were that many Hillary Clinton emails on the computer in the first place, as the Washington Post reported Clinton’s account had 62,320 sent and received emails between March 2009 and February 2013.

Even still, the FBI wouldn’t have to physically read every single one of them, as Wired notes, citing cyber security and forensics experts. Filtering and search tools can easily weed out the irrelevant emails. First, investigators could narrow down the number of emails simply by scanning for Clinton’s email address in the To and From fields.

Then they’d determine which were duplicates of the emails they’d previously investigated — many reports claimed that the majority of emails being probed in this latest batch were indeed duplicates. Every email carries a unique message ID, a series of numbers and letters, which makes duplicates easy to identify.

As for emails that had the same content but were included in replies or forwards, there are programs that can parse and analyze text for duplicate information. Investigators could sort emails by thread, according to the experts, so if there were a chain of personal Hillary Clinton emails about a birthday party, the FBI could dismiss those.

To locate any relevant emails, the FBI can also use keywords related to topics it focused on in the previous investigation. All of these measures could have eliminated hundreds of thousands of irrelevant emails. While the FBI has not revealed how many potentially relevant emails agents actually read with their own eyes, even if they number in the thousands, the task could be split between several investigators and handled efficiently.

So it’s easily feasible that the investigators could examine 650,000 emails in a week.

The Hillary Clinton emails ended up on the laptop because, according to Newsweek, Clinton prefers to read documents on paper instead of screens. Abedin told the FBI earlier this year that she often had trouble printing emails using unwieldy government network technology. So, she often transferred unclassified State Department emails to her Yahoo account or her account on Clinton’s email server (which she used only for matters relating to Clinton’s personal affairs) to print them out.

Abedin seemingly printed many of these emails without reading them, as Clinton often forwarded emails to her for printing and she was seen as someone who could get Clinton to pay attention to certain matters, so staff members would send Hillary Clinton emails for her to pass onto the secretary to see.

[Featured Image by Andrew Harnik/AP Images]

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