With the tension peaking just before the US elections, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden provided the perfect refutation of Donald Trump's accusation against the FBI.
After the FBI conveyed its decision to not press any charges against Hillary Clinton in relation to the email row, the Republican candidate responded by adopting an accusatory tone, asking how exactly the investigative body managed to go through 6,50,000 emails in just over a week.
Using his signature rhetoric, Trump said, "Right now she’s being protected by a rigged system. It’s a totally rigged system.”
This conspiracy theory of Trump gained traction among his supporters. Michael Fynn, a retired lieutenant general in the US army and a supporter of Trump, raised the issue in his tweet:
However, the air was cleared when Snowden, responding to a query by blogger Jeff Jarvis, pithily summed up how easy it would be for the FBI to analyse a large number of emails.
In fact, Snowden claimed that the task could be done even by old laptops "in minutes-to-hours."
Although there is no love lost between Snowden and Clinton, the former’s tweet indirectly defends her. Snowden’s response just goes on to show the superficial nature of Trump’s accusations.
Notably, the FBI’s decision to not charge Clinton came just a week after it reopened the whole controversy about her private email server, when it said that it had discovered emails “pertinent” to the issue.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)