investigation forget about russian hackers. if he was investigating the trump campaign in any instance, if he sent a memo to congress revealing that on friday, you would have thought that was fine, 11 days before the election? or you would have complained that that was an improper abuse of power? law enforcement needs to do their job. and we wish the fbi had done their job properly earlier in the summer, and that charges had been brought against secretary clinton. i don t think there s any way to look at this and not say the whole outside server that was set up, the reasons for which it was set up, the fact that we have confidential and classified information being routed around it, and tying it all back into the clinton foundation, this whole incestuous mix going on, we wish they had pushed forward and done the right thing earlier. glad they re righting the wrong now. the timing of which i ll leave it to you guys and pete williams and everyone else, but the important thing is he
the comey letter has not come out yet. you wake up on friday and suddenly learn the news in the afternoon that james comey, the director of the fbi, has sent a letter to congress saying that the fbi has opened an investigation into the connection between vladimir putin, russian hackers, and the trump campaign. you would say, 11 days before the election, your reaction to that would have been what? well, i mean, that s a silly hypothetical to go and throw out? i don t think there s anything silly about it. this issue has been raised many times in the course of the campaign. the chief ethics officer for george w. bush s administration made exactly this type of hypothetical in the new york times over the weekend. there s no basis of truth. let s talk about why we re here. because hillary clinton that s not i appreciate that, but i m trying to stay with my question. it s not really a crazy hypothetical. if it happened, your reaction would be, that s perfectly proper for the fb
understandab understandably, correctly, so many unusual things about this case and this matter. i heard you say earlier, one thing, the fbi is now basically being asked to get play-by-play in realtime of an investigation. mixed reporting, where do you stand now, as your understanding, how quickly will they say anything else publicly about this matter? i think they don t know the answer to that question, because they don t know all of what s on this hard drive. so what they ve done is, since they got the search warrant sunday night, allowing the team that did the clinton e-mail investigation to now look at the huma abedin e-mails that were on her estranged husband s computer, now they re doing that. the first step is to make a copy of the hard drive. you always work on a copy, so you don t accidentally erase anything on the hard drive. so now they re analyzing it and they have a big universe of data they re going to trim down. they start with all of her e-mails, that s easy to do, the
narrow that down to just those sent when clinton was secretary of state. then once they have that, they ll apply what s called a d-duping program to basically eliminate any e-mails that were already seen by the team. any of the thousands of e-mails that the fbi already acquired in its investigation of the clinton e-mail server. whatever s left, they will start to look at individually, toss out any that are strictly social, what time do you want the car to pick you up, and then any that are left that discuss governments by, they have to assess whether that s classified information or not. if it turns out that there aren t any left after the d-duping function, then they can say, okay, we ve looked, and there s nothing here. in which case, they would make a public statement. but if it s going to take time to run down the province of any new providence of any new e-mails, then that s going to take time. there was some initial optimism, they might be able to say something in the next coup
clinton e-mail thing was done, too. they also felt micromanaged by this. they felt that every step they took had to be cleared by main justice and they didn t like that. so i think that s some of what s reflected in this story. but pete, obviously, the dpg you re talking about occurs all the time. but the concern that some have, and the trump campaign is raising is, is it possible that the motives had to do with politics, that loretta lynch or anyone else in the justice department, the deputy attorney general, trying to protect the democrats. is there any indication that that claim is being made by anyone in the fbi? well, sure. i mean, it s being made by some people in the fbi, by some street agents, who are upset by how this is being run. and a lot of people outside the fbi are upset by it. but i don t think it s a widely held view in the fbi that it s politics. okay. pete williams, nbc news, pete, thank you very much. you bet.