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The newly unsealed court filings demonstrate that the FBI's investigation did not rely solely on the voluntary cooperation of those involved, since agents and prosecutors used a combination of search warrants and other court orders to gain evidence relevant to the probe. | T.J. Kirkpatrick/Getty Images Unsealed documents detail tactics in Clinton email probe

Court documents approved for release in the lead-up to a massive Justice Department watchdog report on the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email account offer fodder for both critics and defenders of the bureau's work.

The newly unsealed court filings, obtained by POLITICO, may well serve as a Rorschach test about the Clinton email probe. They demonstrate that the FBI's investigation did not rely solely on the voluntary cooperation of those involved, since agents and prosecutors used a combination of search warrants and other court orders to gain evidence relevant to the probe.

At the same time, the records do not contradict complaints by Republicans that the FBI did not use grand jury subpoenas to demand testimony from top Clinton aides, obtain search warrants to gain access to laptops Clintons' lawyers used to review her emails, or seek the personal phones and similar devices used by her top aides.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz sought unsealing of the records in May, in order to allow him to publish some details from the filings in his report released in June on alleged misconduct at the FBI and Justice Department prior to the 2016 presidential election.

Nearly 100 pages of filings from federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, show how investigators used a very broad search warrant in September 2015 to gain access to the email account of top Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan. The FBI told a federal magistrate judge that a July 2009 email forwarded to Sullivan's personal Gmail account showed that "top secret" information, including records related to sensitive satellite imagery, likely resided on Google's servers.

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Investigators don't appear to have disclosed the subject matter of the message to the magistrate, but records made public by the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act show it pertained to a launch of ballistic missiles by North Korea.

Based largely on the forwarding of that message, the magistrate agreed to allow the FBI to obtain every message in Sullivan's Gmail account and review each that was sent to or from or copied to a dot-gov email address. In addition, the FBI was permitted to review any message in Sullivan's account that contained a "key word" from a list the FBI put together. It appears that list was not shared with the magistrate who issued the warrant. "The list of terms is subject to modification and is updated as necessary to reflect case developments," an FBI agent wrote in the court submission.

The search warrant for Sullivan's Gmail account appears to contain no date range or other limitation on the age of messages the FBI could access. The federal court filings also show the use of a search warrant to obtain greater access to a server Clinton's attorneys turned over. The FBI said Clinton's lawyers gave permission only to search the email domain she used, clintonemail.com, and not others on the server. A search warrant was also obtained for an email account set up by Paul Combetta, a technology aide who said he set up the account to store some of Clinton's messages while copying them from a laptop to a server at his firm, Platte River Networks.

Sullivan was not the only Clinton aide to have a personal email account accessed by investigators. The FBI also collected years of information on the email accounts used by longtime Clinton personal aide Huma Abedin and Clinton adviser Cheryl Mills. In February 2016, investigators received a magistrate order allowing access to address and timing details on more than four years' worth of emails Abedin sent and received on a Yahoo account, although they did not — at that time — gain access to the messages themselves.

To obtain the order, the FBI cited an October 2009 message about U.S. policy in Pakistan that Abedin forwarded from her official State account to her personal Yahoo one. Another version of the message sent the following day to national security adviser James Jones was classified as "Secret." Abedin told FBI interviewers she didn't know the message, unmarked in the version sent to her, was classified.

The unsealed court documents black out the names of two other individuals whose email metadata was obtained by court order as part of the FBI's Clinton email probe. However, their identities are fairly obvious from details in the filings.

One is Philippe Reines, who was a senior adviser to Clinton and later was formally named a deputy assistant secretary of state for strategic communications. The records show that on May 1, 2016, the FBI got a metadata order covering use of Reines' Gmail account for the four-plus years he was at State. The sole basis for the order appears to be a single email Reines sent on March 21, 2009. It's described as having been deemed by the CIA to be classified "Secret" and not for distribution to foreign governments.

The message in question appears to be one Reines sent to Clinton from his personal email account with a subject line referencing Afghanistan's president at the time, Hamid Karzai. "I think you know that my close friend Jeremy Bash is now Panetta's Chief of Staff at CIA," the one-page message to Clinton begins. The rest was withheld from public release under the Freedom of Information Act based on a legal provision exempting intelligence methods.

The other person whose name was deleted from the court documents appears to be a Japan-based venture capitalist and management consultant, Mitch Murata. He drew the attention of investigators for an email he sent to friends about the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactor after it was hit by a tidal wave in 2011. A friend of a friend sent it to Mills, who sent it to two State Department officials and to Clinton.

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which runs America's spy satellites, determined that part of the message contained information considered "Secret" and not for foreign distribution. How that information would have ended up with Murata is unclear. In any event, the FBI used it to obtain two months of metadata from Murata's Gmail account.

A lawyer for Mills, Sullivan and Reines did not respond to a request for comment for this post. Murata could not be reached for comment.