Clinton Lawyer "Appalled" at Lack of Information Used to Justify Email Probe

An unsealed warrant from the FBI requesting further investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server during her time as secretary of State showed no "probable cause" to continue the probe, according to lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg.

Schoenberg filed a Freedom of Information Act request Monday to make public documents from FBI director James Comey requesting that the bureau search for classified materials on the laptop of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner, who was being indicted for sexually explicit correspondences with a 15-year-old girl, is the husband of Huma Abedin. Abedin, a Clinton aide and close confidant, shared a computer with her estranged spouse.

But Schoenberg said he was "appalled" at the lack of evidence that justified further investigation, especially in the final days of the presidential campaign.

"I see nothing at all in the search warrant application that would give rise to probable cause," Schoenberg told Newsweek Tuesday, "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."

Brian Fallon, a former spokesman for the Democratic candidate, tweeted his outrage at the FBI, saying its actions were "as utterly unjustified as we suspected at [the] time."

"There was nothing in search warrant filing to controvert Comey's statements from July and truly establish probable cause of a crime," Fallon said on Twitter. In another tweet, he said, "Whenever Comey departs FBI, this episode will be in first graf of any assessment of his tenure. "It is stain on his personal legacy [and on] the FBI."

The FBI investigation turned up no additional classified materials on Weiner's laptop, and the bureau barely reviewed the documents outside of perusing their subject lines, as ABC News reports.

Comey released a letter to Congress October 28 announcing the FBI's intention to search the laptop. Just 48 hours before the election, he said the bureau had not "changed [its] conclusions expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton."

As many have reported, the damage to Clinton's campaign had already been done by that point.

A report from FiveThirtyEight suggested that the Comey letter led to many undecided and swing voters abandoning Clinton in the final days before the election. The website claims that the former secretary of State lost 1.7 percentage points to her Republican challenger, which likely tipped the scales in Trump's favor.

Neither Clinton nor the FBI has responded to the warrant's release.