- Huma Abedin details the moment she found out the FBI seized her ex-husband’s laptop in 2016.
- “The instant she said ‘Anthony,’ my heart stopped,” Abedin writes in her forthcoming book.
- The FBI reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton was a major boost for Trump.
Toward the end of her forthcoming book, longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin recounts the exact moment she discovered her ex-husband’s laptop had been seized by the FBI in the homestretch of the 2016 election.
Insider obtained an early copy of her memoir, “Both/And: A life in Many Worlds,” which will be released on November 2.
One of several so-called October surprises from that election, sexting-implicated Anthony Weiner’s laptop resulted in the FBI reopening its investigation into Clinton’s use of private emails as Secretary of State, months after it had been closed by then-FBI Director James Comey in a highly unusual press conference.
The laptop was initially in possession of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York in their investigation of Weiner’s online conversations with a teenage girl, but when emails from Abedin were also found on the laptop, it was turned over to the FBI. The State Department later released those emails, which did not change the outcome of the Clinton investigation after it had been previously closed.
“The instant she said ‘Anthony,’ my heart stopped,” Abedin writes, referring to Jen Palmieri, the Clinton campaign’s communications director, who told her upon getting off a flight. “No, no, no. I had handled this, I had taken control of this. I had sent him away. It had cost us a fortune, I had cobbled together a life of relative normalcy for my son, I came to the office every day. This couldn’t be happening now.”
Comey would later say he felt “mildly nauseous” to think his October letter on the Weiner laptop could have influenced the results of the 2016 election.
In the more than 500-page book, Abedin chronicles the evolution of her relationship with Weiner going back to the early 2000s when they first met at a Democratic Party retreat on Martha’s Vineyard and through their divorce following his multiple sexting scandals, which landed him a 21-month prison sentence.
“No matter how hard I tried, whether it was to help Anthony, to threaten him, to sympathize with him, to ignore him, to throw him out of my house, it was impossible to move on,” Abedin writes later on in the laptop passage. “This man was going to ruin me, and now he was going to jeopardize HRC’s chances of winning the presidency, which would leave our country in the hands of someone dangerously unfit for the office.”
Abedin describes seeing Hillary Clinton find out about Weiner’s laptop and its implications for her bid to become the nation’s first woman president.
“I watched HRC’s face as she processed it,” she writes. “The moment she made eye contact with me, I just broke down.”
“I had held it together for months—through the night of the shocking photo, all the meetings with Children’s Services, the paparazzi on the street, becoming a single parent overnight, the daily hate messages, and even, until just a few minutes ago, the news about Comey’s announcement to Congress,” Abedin continues. “But now that I knew the investigation somehow involved my own email, tears flowed out of me. HRC stood up from her seat, came over to hug me, and then walked with me to the bathroom so I could compose myself.”
As in much of the book, Abedin credits Clinton for going above and beyond as a boss and mentor.
“On a plane full of colleagues, Secret Service agents, reporters, photographers—everyone with eyes simultaneously averted and questioning—she did that,” Abedin writes.
“Both/And: A life in Many Worlds” is set for a Nove. 2 hardcover release.
