The first thing I'd do is put a turn to poly modifier on it. It might be worth putting an stl check on it and seeing if that picks anything out too. It is possible to hide subobjects but the object would have to have been previously edited in max so if its just been imported you can probably discount that.
Alright, update time! So the grow select or select by angle didn't work unfortunately. A lot of the same behavior as the element select carried through to that method. The STL check did work on some cases paired with a turn to poly modifier, so thank you on that. I assume the meshes that that method didn't work on are too…
@Revel I will try that and report back. @poopipe I will try the STL check as well. I'm fairly certain that the mesh in question and when this does happen is from someone else importing the CATIA data into 3ds max and then converting said files into editable polys. When I did the same the only way that I could achieve the…