If all is as Hillary Clinton has claimed about the emails she deleted from her private server, this new development should be a big step toward ending the controversy over it, one way or the other:
The FBI has recovered personal and work-related e-mails from the private computer server used by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, according to a person familiar with the investigation....
The FBI is investigating how and why classified information ended up on Clinton’s server. The probe probably will take at least several more months, according to the person, who described the matter on condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing and deals with sensitive information.
A review by Clinton and her aides determined that about half of the 60,000 e-mails she exchanged during her four-year tenure as secretary of state were of a personal nature, the presidential candidate has said.
Those e-mails, she said, mostly dealt with planning for Chelsea’s wedding, yoga routines and condolence messages....
The exact number of personal e-mails recovered by the FBI could not be learned.
Once the e-mails have been extracted, a group of agents has been separating personal correspondence and passing along work-related messages to agents leading the investigation, the person said....
The bureau’s probe is expected to last at least several more months, according to the person. That timeline would push any final determination closer to the Democratic presidential primary calendar, which kicks off Feb. 1 with the Iowa caucuses....
Clinton is not accused of any wrongdoing. She has said she is confident that material in her e-mails wasn’t marked as classified when it was sent and received through her server. For anyone who mishandled such information, prosecutors must prove that they knowingly did so to charge them with a crime....
Many of the work-related e-mails contain schedules, press clippings, staffing updates, speech notes, and requests to aides for tech support. Some e-mails are simply requests to speak with people over secure phone lines.
The questions over her use of a private email server for work email have definitely impacted her polling numbers over the past few months, but it looks like the slide has slowed, or maybe even begun to reverse.
As long as those deleted emails that the FBI has now recovered contain nothing more than routine administrative messages among the work emails and notes on yoga routines and Chelsea’s wedding arrangements among the personal emails, this whole issue looks like it will have been a big nothingburger as far as its impact on the primaries and probably the general election too.
If there's anything severely untoward, though, it looks like the timing of the wrapup of the investigation might be such as to have an outsized effect on who wins the Democratic nomination.