they were found on anthony wiener's device. they are being looked at as part of an unrelated investigation of wiener. the announcement coming 11 days before the election and months after he announced there was not enough evidence to charge clinton or others connected to the server that she used as secretary of state. for more on the reaction to this this story playing out as we speak, michael steel and former dnc chair, both of them msnbc contributors. i will start with you and we heard from the clinton campaign and they said they are in the worst of both worlds and he is putting this letter out and bringing this issue back. you cast doubt here. he is saying and i'm reading the letter closely. he said it appears to be pertinent and that suggests that the e-mails and the fbi believes that the e-mails they have come across and they believe them to be and they lock like they are relevant to the server investigation. given that, if that is the judgment they are making here, the fbi would get criticized if they didn't come out with

you know wiener, clinton, trump, director comey. what do you make of this? >> i cannot believe, the last week before the election, it all comes back to anthony weiner. i mean, that is just an amazing notion in terms of how shakespearean this all is. i think, i don't know the facts, just like attorney general gonzalez just said. but based on what we do know, it's hard to imagine that director comey had good options here. right? i mean, he's basically being accused or has been accused by both candidates at different times, accused of rigging the election. so if he withheld the information and not made this unpresidented move, republicans would have excoriated him after the election. by doing what he did now, the democrats are excoriating him. i don't know what he's supposed to do. i do know this about him. he's got a lot of critics in washington, d.c., but one thing he's wide lly regarded as is beg pretty independent. he worked in the bush administration. he was controversial in the bush administration. he threatened to resign from the bush administration over

>> i shouldn't comment on anthony wiener. i'm not a big fan. >> so real. >> up next, will comeygate have an fekt on the polls? stay with us. ouroptions untiy-f. now is a good timeo get the ball rolling. consider an rpedicar supplement insurance pn like any of ese typesre oflans,ompy. it could help you with out-of-pocket call now and requestour free cision guide and exthe rae ofarp medicareplement ans. start thering the informatione.. cision guide rl into sixty-fe confiden. start thering the informatione.. cision guide the strikingly-desigdimpos. xus nx tur a hybri geupo $5,0 custor cash on select 2016 mels. see your lexusealer. >>> we have more people voting now than ever before. people we've never seen before. they've never voted before or haven't voted for 20 years and they're all voting for trump. >> two days after fbi director james comey released his letter to congress about newly discovered e-mails that might be pertinent to the clinton server case, hillary clinton still up in the national polling average but her lead i

nbc news justice correspondent pete williams said the fbi had anthony wiener's laptop for weeks. he says the fbi is going through the formal process of getting a search rwarrant and that the agency has not looked at the e-mails in detail. let's bring in peter emerson and noel nickpore. peter, i will ask you first off here, your reaction, the timing here of this announcement. does this suggest to you some political motivations at work? >> i am not going to judge what people's motivations are. but let me simply point out, because i like to live in the facts, that the letter that comey said that although the fbi cannot yet assess whether this material may be significant. then they pointed out, it was not about content of e-mail evidence but rather a plan to get to it. so given what the tradition is at the department of justice and most importantly what comey himself said in 2007, before a senate and house committees, that the justice department had to be perceived at nonpartisan and non-political to function, i can only suggest that comey is neither naive nor stupid. so he had to kn

but officials familiar with this development say it's the investigation of former congressman anthony weiner and here's how that comes in. the fbi has been looking at whether wiener sent sexually explicit messages and pictures to an underage girl and they say he used a laptop computer to send some of them. then agents discovered and going through that laptop in the weiner case that a long time clinton aide yuma abedin, wei r weinerr's wife used that same computer. in the e-mail case investigators wanted to examine everything that was sent to her private server to see if any of those merrill e-mails included classified information. they said it had to be reviewed, too. so that's why comey in the letter said that these e-mails were pertinent but he also said he didn't understand their significance. and here's why. because ats don't know what's in them. they haven't examined them. it's possible many of them could be duplicates of what the fbi have already seen but there's no way the review could be done by election day and no way to say yet whether they have any legal significance or not