Yes, the FBI can review 650,000 emails in 8 days

In today's news, Comey announces the FBI have reviewed all 650,000 emails found on Anthony Wiener's computer and determined there's nothing new. Some have questioned whether this could be done in 8 days. Of course it could be -- those were 650,000 emails to Wiener, not Hillary.

IMPOSSIBLE:
There R 691,200 seconds in 8 days. DIR Comey has thoroughly reviewed 650,000 emails in 8 days? An email / second? IMPOSSIBLE RT

— General Flynn (@GenFlynn) November 6, 2016

Reading Wiener's own emails, those unrelated to his wife Huma or Hillary, is unlikely to be productive. Therefore, the FBI is going to filter those 650,000 Wiener emails to get at those emails that were also sent to/from Hillary and Huma.

That's easy for automated tools to do. Just search the From: and To: fields for email addresses known to be used by Hillary and associates. For example, search for hdr29@hrcoffice.com (Hillary's current email address) and ha16@hillaryclinton.com (Huma Abedin's current email).

Below is an example email header from the Podesta dump:

From: Jennifer Palmieri <jpalmieri@hillaryclinton.com>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2015 11:23:56 -0400
Message-ID: <-8018289478115811964@unknownmsgid>
Subject: WJC NBC interview
To: H <hdr29@hrcoffice.com>, John Podesta <john.podesta@gmail.com>, 
 Huma Abedin <ha16@hillaryclinton.com>, Robby Mook <re47@hillaryclinton.com>, 
 Kristina Schake <kschake@hillaryclinton.com>

This is likely to filter down the emails to a manageable few thousand.

Next, filter the emails for ones already in the FBI's possession. The easiest way is using the Message-ID: header. It's a random value created for every email. If a Weiner email has the same Message-ID as an email already retrieved from Huma and Hillary, then the FBI can ignore it.

This is then like to reduce the number of emails need for review to less than a thousand, or less than 100, or even all the way down to zero. And indeed, that's what NBC news is reporting:

NBC's Pete Williams reports that nearly all of the e-mails found on the Weiner laptop were duplicates of e-mails FBI already reviewed.

— Tom Winter (@Tom_Winter) November 6, 2016

The point is is this. Computer geeks have tools that make searching the emails extremely easy. Given those emails, and a list of known email accounts from Hillary and associates, and a list of other search terms, it would take me only a few hours to do reduce the workload from 650,000 emails to only a couple hundred, which a single person can read in less than a day.

The question isn't whether the FBI could review all those emails in 8 days, but why the FBI couldn't have reviewed them all in one or two days. Or even why they couldn't have reviewed them before Comey made that horrendous announcement that they were reviewing the emails.

@SarahClapp @BernardKerik They pictured Comey with a huge printer, reams of paper and a highlighter

— Atomic Elbow (@AtomicElbow1) November 6, 2016