Double Whammy! Judge Orders Clinton Email ‘Inquiry’ Reopened
District Judge Royce Lambert blasted the Obama Administration State and Justice Department for ‘falling short’ and ‘making things worse’ in the Clinton email scandal, and has ordered an inquiry reopened.
A federal judge has ordered the State and Justice departments to reopen an inquiry related to the Clinton email scandal.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the Justice and State departments yesterday to reopen an inquiry into whether Hillary Clinton used a private email server while secretary of state “to deliberately evade public records laws, and to answer whether the agencies acted in bad faith by not telling a court for months that they had asked in mid-2014 for missing emails to be returned.”
Lamberth said the Freedom of Information Act demanded it.
In a 10-page opinion, Lamberth blasted the departments saying, “faced with one of the gravest modern offenses to government openness, [the Obama administration’s] State and Justice departments fell far short” of the law.
Lamberth wrote “the current Justice Department made things worse,” by saying agencies are not obliged to search for records not in the government’s possession in a FOIA request.
Lamberth wrote their response “smacks of outrageous misconduct.”
Legal watchdog group Judicial Watch “filed its FOIA lawsuit in July 2014 seeking State Department talking points issued after the September 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, that left the U.S. ambassador dead.”
“The suit came months before news broke in March 2015 that Clinton exclusively used a private email account as secretary from 2009 to 2013.
“Between July 2014 and March 2015, the State Department said in court filings that its document searches were adequate and did not mention unsearched records as it proposed to settle the case. The agencies later acknowledged that additional searches would be needed, without disclosing that it had received 30,000 emails returned by Clinton.”
At best, Lamberth said the departments acted with “negligence born of incompetence,” adding, “At worst, career employees in the State and Justice departments colluded to scuttle public scrutiny of Clinton, skirt FOIA, and hoodwink this court.”
Lamberth ordered attorneys to meet with Judicial Watch and be ready to answer additional questions about whether “Clinton used a private email to stymie FOIA, whether State’s attempts to settle the case in 2014 and 2015 amounted to bad faith, and whether State’s subsequent searches have been adequate.”
Clinton has repeatedly claimed she used her personal email system as a matter of convenience while she was secretary of state and it was a ‘mistake.’
However, recent revelations show that she deliberately sent classified information through the server, and some have speculated that a number of U.S. assets were slaughtered because the server was hacked and sending real-time information to China.
Most people are hoping that these combined revelations will lead to the complete downfall of liberal master Hillary Clinton.
