In March of this year we reported that a judge ruled in favor of Judicial Watch to depose both Hillary Clinton and her chief of staff over the email server scandal. Well that’s now been overturned:
FOX NEWS – A federal appeals court on Friday overturned an order that would have made former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her former chief of staff sit for a private deposition about her use of a private email server for government work when she served as the nation’s top diplomat.
A district court in March had granted conservative watchdog Judicial Watch its request to depose both Clinton and former chief of staff Cheryl Mills to depose them about topics related to the use of a server.
The case had arisen from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Judicial Watch to the State Department. Clinton has argued that she has already answered questions about the controversy and should not have to do so again — the matter did not result in any charges for the then-presidential candidate in 2016 after a high-profile investigation — but D.C. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth said in his ruling that her past responses left much to be desired.
The appeals court abused Lamberth of abusing his ‘discretion’:
The appeals court accused the district court of having abused its discretion, having used suspicions of bad faith by the government to opening the door to what the appeals court described as “far-reaching” depositions.
“The mere suspicion of bad faith on the part of the government cannot be used as a dragnet to authorize voluminous discovery that it is irrelevant to the remaining issues in a case,” the ruling said.
“The District Court has impermissibly ballooned the scope of its inquiry into allegations of bad faith to encompass a continued probe of Secretary Clinton’s state of mind surrounding actions taken years before the at-issue searches were conducted by the State Department,’ the ruling said.
Mark Levin tweeted out his disdain for the ruling, looking forward to the Flynn ruling the court is also considering:
So the same Court that’s protective of Judge Sullivan in Flynn case claims Judge Lambert’s abused just discretion in Hillary case. https://t.co/L9ZE9RBOMz
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) August 14, 2020
The ruling from the three judges was unanimous, with two of them being Obama appointees and one a George W. Bush appointee.