FEINSTEIN: Why was it necessary to announce 11 days before a presidential election that you were opening an investigation on a new computer without any knowledge of what was in that computer. Why didn't you just do the investigation as you would normally, with no public announcement?
COMEY: Great question, Senator, thank you. (On) October 27, the investigative team that had finished the investigation in July focused on Secretary Clinton's emails asked to meet with me. So I met with them that morning, late morning in my conference room and they laid out for me what they could see from the metadata on this fella (former congressman) Anthony Weiner's laptop that had been seized in an unrelated case.
What they could see from the metadata was that there were thousands of Secretary Clinton's emails on that device including what they thought might be the missing emails from her first three months as secretary of state. We never found any emails from her first three months. She was using a Verizon Blackberry then and that's obviously very important because if there was evidence that she was acting with bad intent, that's where it would be.
FEINSTEIN: But they weren't there.
COMEY: Can I just finish my answer, senator? And so they came in and said we can see thousands of emails from the Clinton email domain including many, many, many from the Verizon Clinton domain, Blackberry domain. They said we think we gotta get a search warrant to go get these and the Department of Justice agreed. We had to go get a search warrant. So I agreed. I authorized them to seek a search warrant.
