Clinton email-probe results forwarded to judges
'Judicial Watch wants to know facts behind purposeful thwarting of FOIA'
Published: 12 hours ago
Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially.
The results of an inspector general’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server already are being forwarded to judges handling several court fights over the content of the communications because it concluded the front-runner for the Democratic nod for president “exploited a loophole” in the Freedom of Information Act processes.
The announcement comes from officials with Judicial Watch, the Washington watchdog group that has been fighting in and out of court for access to those formal government communications.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton made the announcement after the report was released by the State Department’s Office of Insepctor General. It found, according to a Fox report, that the FOIA law “neither authorizes nor requires agencies to search for federal records in personal email accounts maintained on private servers or through commercial providers. … Furthermore, the FOIA analyst has no way to independently locate federal records from such accounts unless employees take steps to preserve official emails in department record keeping systems.”
The problem is that Hillary Clinton, while secretary of state, ran her own email system, and most communications never made it into official government records. She has claimed she turned over copies of all the emails that she thought belonged to the government from that system.
But Judicial Watch has been fighting several legal cases involving emails that may not have been searched under FOIA because of their status on a private server.
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“Judicial Watch is asking for discovery concerning Hillary Clinton’s emails in three separate FOIA lawsuits against the State Department,” the organization said Thursday in a statement.
There’s a lawsuit against Secretary of State John Kerry to force action on Clinton emails, a second for records of talking points given to Ambassador Rice regarding the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and another for records on State Department’s ‘Special Government Employment’ status for Clinton aide Huma Abedin.”
“The Clinton email scandal is worsening,” Fitton said. “Today’s State OIG report confirms what we’ve been saying all along – that Hillary Clinton and the Obama State Department thwarted specific Judicial Watch FOIA requests by lying about her email system with ‘inaccurate’ and ‘incomplete’ responses.
“The State Department OIG report is half-baked but nonetheless devastating in laying out the violations of law and regulations by Hillary Clinton and her then-Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills. Judicial Watch plans to share this report with several federal courts considering our requests for discovery about the Clinton email issue,” he continued.
“The OIG admits it still doesn’t know the extent of the inaccuracies and other violations of FOIA and correctly suggests that officials could be held in contempt of court for FOIA fraud. This is exactly why Judicial Watch is asking the courts for discovery, which could include putting current and former Obama administration officials under oath. Judicial Watch wants to know the facts behind Hillary Clinton’s and the Obama State Department’s purposeful thwarting of FOIA so we can be sure that all of the emails from her illicit email system are reviewed and released to the public as the law requires.”
Fox reported Clinton exploited that private server loophole.
The network said, “The report strongly suggests that it relies on employees at all levels to follow the regulations, and when personal email is used, to forward copies to a State Department account so that it can be captured.”
The actual report said, “Under current law and department policy, employees who use personal email to conduct official business are required to forward or copy email from a personal account to their respective department accounts within 20 days.”
Clinton did not have a State Department email address to send communications, and Fox said, “it remains unclear whether she provided all her State Department business emails to the State Department or federal courts, where FOIA lawsuits have been filed.”
It continued, “The State Department is also criticized for practices that ‘do not consistently meet statutory and regulatory requirements for completeness and rarely meet requirements for timeliness.’”
WND has reported multiple times on the Clinton email scandal, including the fact that many of the Clinton emails were secret or classified, and still were housed on a private server that for a time wasn’t even encrypted.
The State Department’s most recent action was the release of 7,800 of Clinton’s emails. By the numbers, the latest batch includes 328 emails dubbed classified. And as the State Department has previously released, that 328 brings the total of Clinton’s private server emails categorized as classified to 999, Fox News said.
Just in time for the 2016 election, hear Hillary Clinton say she would NOT run for president, in “Hillary Unhinged” by Thomas Kuiper
FBI Director James Comey, a Republican who was appointed by President Obama, has to some degree Clinton’s fate in his hands. He’s in charge of the federal investigation of Clinton’s use of her private email server for secretary of state correspondence and wields considerable power in determining whether she engaged in illegal or improper behaviors.
Comey, as the Hill noted, has bipartisan support and is known for his aggressive pursuit of prosecutions. He once, for example, stopped then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales from obtaining the hospital bedside signature of Attorney General John Ashcroft to continue a surveillance program on domestic soil
Of his FBI investigators, Comey said this, earlier this year, the Hill reported: “My folks don’t give a rip about politics. We’re competent, we’re independent and we’re honest.”
Read more at
http://www.wnd.com/2016/01/clinton-email-investigation-results-forwarded-to-judges/#dEAS8qvGBUgUVlEO.99
