Agent who uncovered laptop with Hillary’s emails was warned against blowing whistle

by WorldTribune Staff, September 22, 2020

An FBI agent who uncovered the Anthony Weiner laptop containing thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails says he was warned that he would be prosecuted if he became a whistleblower on the contents of the emails.

John Robertson was an FBI agent who investigated crimes against children when he came upon the laptop and the Clinton emails, the Washington Examiner reported on Sept. 19.

Robertson said that, as part of a sex crimes case involving underage girls, he unearthed tens of thousands of Clinton emails in late September 2016 on the laptop belonging to Weiner, the husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The FBI agent said that for weeks after being alerted, top bureau leaders (including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap) took little to no action to investigate.

“The crickets I was hearing was really making me uncomfortable because something was going to come down,” Robertson reportedly later told Department of Justice investigators. “Why isn’t anybody here? Like, if I’m the supervisor of any [counterintelligence] squad … and I hear about this, I’m getting on with headquarters and saying, ‘Hey, some agent working child porn here may have [Hillary Clinton] emails. Get your ass on the phone, call [the case agent], and get a copy of that drive,’ because that’s how it should be. And that nobody reached out to me within, like, that night, I still to this day don’t understand what the hell went wrong.”

Robertson wrote a “Letter to Self” in late October after an Oct. 19, 2016, meeting, during which he implored Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Kramer of the Southern District of New York to push FBI leadership to look at the thousands of emails he had unearthed.

“I have very deep misgivings about the institutional response of the FBI to the congressional investigation into the Hillary Clinton email matter. … Put simply: I don’t believe the handling of the material I have by the FBI is ethically or morally right. But my lawyer’s advice — that I simply put my SSA on notice should cover me — is that I have completed CYA [Cover Your Ass], and I have done so,” Robertson wrote. “Further, I was told by [Kramer] that should I ‘whistleblow,’ I will be prosecuted.”

Robertson continued: “I possess — the FBI possesses — 20 times more emails than Comey testified to. … While Comey did not know at the time about what I have, people in the FBI do now, and as far as I know, we are being silent. … If I say or do nothing more, I am falling short ethically and morally. And later, I may be accused of being a Hillary Clinton hack because of the timing of all this. … But if I say something (i.e., whistleblow), I will lose my reputation, my career, and risk prosecution. I will also be accused of being a Donald Trump hack.”

He wrote that “nothing could be further from the truth” because “I am apolitical.”

During a July 2016 speech, Comey said that Clinton was “extremely careless” in handling classified emails, adding that he would not recommend criminal charges. Clinton’s IT team had deleted 33,000 supposedly non-work-related emails.


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