Eleven Days to Go

Allow me to speculate. Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin communicating hourly via email. The topics involved everything from the inner workings of the State Department, to The Clinton Foundation, to political manipulation of the State Department, to the Teneo consulting firm (for whom Abedin worked while employed at State), to fat cat donors from foreign governments, to anybody else who came within the purview of the Clintons. It's very likely that Huma Abedin used a notebook computer for these communications.

At some later time, Aberdeen decided to give the notebook computer to her husband, Anthony Weiner as a hand-me-down, a practice not uncommon between spouses—in fact, I've done it a number of times myself. Prior to doing this, Abedin did what what was prudent—she deleted all personal, private, and in her case, Clinton related emails and files.

She didn't use a sophisticated system like BleachBit, but rather simply deleted those emails and files, thinking they were gone for good. She didn't realize that a "delete" simply modifies the disk directory; it doesn't actually delete the content that continues to live on the disk drive.

When Anthony Weiner was placed under FBI investigation for his sexting scandal, the FBI seized his computers including Huma Abedin's hand-me-down. It's unlikely that the FBI realized the computer was originally Abedin's, until they did a forensic analysis on the hard drive.

The forensic analysis turned up thousands of emails that Hillary Clinton had illegally deleted from her server. It's probable that a significant number of these emails are incriminating on a variety of levels. Some may have contained secret or top-secret communications as attachments. Others may have described unsavory practices between the State Department and The Clinton Foundation, and still others may have provided hard evidence of Pay-for-Play at the State Department. Who knows?

When this new find and information was presented to FBI director, James Comey, he had no choice but to make a difficult political decision and open up the botched FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton once again. It was a political bombshell.

Hillary Clinton and her supporters are now crying foul, suggesting that the introduction of this so late in the political campaign is "unfair" and "partisan." However, Hillary has no one to blame but herself. The Clintonistas narrative will be that Comey should have waited until after the election. That's like saying that if Hillary Clinton shot Bill Clinton next Wednesday after finding him in bed with a nubile 25-year old, the police should suppress that information until after the election because it might reflect badly on Hillary. Utter nonsense!

For those of us who believe that Hillary Clinton is dishonest, corrupt, and incompetent, it's difficult not to take some satisfaction in all of this. It's highly unlikely that any adjudication will occur before election day. However, the atmospherics are awful, and it could very well be a game changer in this crazy election.

The juxtaposition of Hillary Clinton's lost emails and Anthony Weiner's (a.k.a. "Carlos Danger") sexting scandal is both comical and pathetic. And we still have 11 days to go!

UPDATE-1:
-----------------
There's a wry twitter post after the bombshell broke that I can't resist sharing (author unknown). It goes (paraphrasing slightly) like this:

Anthony Weiner provides us with clear evidence that despite rumors to the contrary, the Clintons don't kill people.

UPDATE-2:
-------------------
The Wall Street Journal editorial board comments:

Mrs. Clinton could be entering the White House amid an ongoing ethics investigation, which may be a historical first. If Republicans hold Congress, investigations of the FBI investigation are a near-certainty, with agents sworn to tell the truth. Did Mr. Comey reopen the case because of internal dissent within the FBI about the probe and his apparent political favoritism? Or did he worry that a congressional probe might uncover new evidence if he didn’t give the FBI a do-over?

Mrs. Clinton has herself to blame for this fiasco. Nobody forced her to use a private server, ignore warnings about classified material, and then stonewall when her conduct was exposed to voters. Even her advisers were privately shocked, or claimed to be. In a hacked John Podesta email from July 2015, [Democratic partisan] Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress vents: “Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private email? And has that person been drawn and quartered? Like [the] whole thing is [expletive] insane.”

It may be insane, but it’s also vintage Hillary Clinton—her preoccupation with secrecy, her recklessness, her lifelong conviction that she’ll never be held accountable. The poor American electorate, already beleaguered enough by the election choice, must now factor James Comey’s reprise into its decision.

Ask yourself this: Would any employer offer you a job if the employer knew your were undergoing a criminal investigation by the FBI? I thought not.