God, James Comey's FBI is one molten core of flaming garbage. On Tuesday, a judge ordered the release of the search warrant on which the Feebs relied to search the laptop of Anthony Wiener, the event that triggered Comey's 11th hour letter to Congress. This, in turn, reopened the whole issue of Hillary Rodham Clinton's e-mails 10 days before the election and marked Comey lousy in American history for the foreseeable future. As The Washington Post reports, the FBI's evidence for seeking the warrant was practically vaporous.

The FBI told a federal judge that it needed to search a computer to resume its investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server because agents had found correspondence on the device between Clinton and top aide Huma Abedin but they did not know what was being discussed, according to newly unsealed court documents. The bureau argued that Clinton and Abedin were previously on email chains in which classified information was discussed, and so there was probable cause to search a computer belonging to Abedin's estranged husband, disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, for information potentially related to the Clinton email case. That search — along with FBI Director James B. Comey's decision to tell Congress that the investigation into Clinton's email practices had resumed — came less than two weeks before the election and upended the presidential campaign.

The FBI's definition of "probable cause" always has differed from how most sensible people would define it, but this is ludicrous in the extreme. And there certainly was nothing there to warrant Comey's telling Congress in a letter he had to know would be made public that close to the election.

E. Randol Schoenberg, the Los Angeles lawyer who sued to have the warrant unsealed, said he saw "nothing at all in the search warrant application that would give rise to probable cause, nothing that would make anyone suspect that there was anything on the laptop beyond what the FBI had already searched and determined not to be evidence of a crime, nothing to suggest that there would be anything other than routine correspondence between Secretary Clinton and her longtime aide Huma Abedin."

"I am appalled," Schoenberg said.

But…but…optics!

Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. weeps in the Beyond.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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