Weiner laptop to McCabe after the morning briefing. McCabe said he could not speculate on what would have happened if the facts were different, but stated that “it certainly is a good thing that George Toscas brought it to my attention.” McCabe added, “Is it something that I should have been getting briefed upon as the month went on? Absolutely.” McCabe told us that he had no idea why the topic of the Weiner laptop “wasn’t making its way into the agenda for those regular meetings and interactions with [Page], [Strzok], Steinbach, the Director.”
We also asked Baker why the Weiner laptop issue reemerged at this time. Baker stated:
[M]y understanding, it was simply that senior managers thought that they had delegated this to the right people and that the issue was being worked. And that they would come back with a proposal about what to do, and that we took the, took our collective eyes off the ball, didn’t pay attention to it, and when it came back and we were informed that it was not resolved, then it became a crisis. That’s the best I can reconstruct for you.
C. McCabe Recollection of Discussion with Comey on October 26
McCabe told us that he remembered mentioning the issue of the Weiner laptop to Comey twice. The first, as we described previously, McCabe stated was shortly after he learned of the laptop in late September. The second time McCabe stated was toward “the end of October”—McCabe estimated it was on October 26—when he sat down with Comey “one-on-one” in Comey’s office. McCabe stated:
I told him we need to have a meeting on this because now we have some, you know, some clarity on, on what’s in this laptop. I specifically remember telling him, this is about that laptop we discussed a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know if he remembered it. McCabe stated that he did not remember Comey asking him about the Weiner laptop during the period between the two meetings. McCabe told us that he believed that second meeting with Comey “was truly the second time that we discussed it.”
We asked McCabe to describe Comey’s reaction to this second conversation about the Weiner laptop. McCabe stated:
The best of my recollection it was just kind of an acknowledgement that, like, this was a very complicated issue that had a lot of problematic, you know, kind of downstream, there are all kinds of decision and issues that were related to this. It would be complicated and, and we need to figure it out.
McCabe said that he did not recall Comey mentioning the issue of congressional notification during this conversation.
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