Hillary Clinton just got some bad news. A judge has reportedly ordered both the DOJ and the State Department to reopen part of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
Here’s what we know:
CHICAGO TRIBUNE – U.S. judge ordered the Justice and State departments Thursday 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.
The order risks reopening partisan wounds that have barely healed since Clinton’s unsuccessful 2016 presidential bid, but in issuing the order Thursday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act required it.
In a narrow but sharply worded 10-page opinion, Lamberth wrote that despite the government’s claimed presumption of transparency, “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’s requirements in a lawsuit for documents.
“Fell far short” is a major understatement. The Obama administration was never the ‘transparent’ government they claimed to be and they intentionally misled people about Hillary’s private email server.
Conservative 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 government’s actions reflect “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.”
I think I’m gonna go with “colluded to scuttle public scrutiny of Clinton, skirt FOIA, and hoodwink this court”, because that is exactly what happened.
The entire reason Hillary set up this personal email in the first place was to keep Congress from getting their grubby hands on her emails. The State Department couldn’t legally give to Congress what it didn’t have in its possession. And the State Department went right along with it.
When it came time to investigate all of this, the DOJ and FBI tried to legally sweep it under the rug because they knew Hillary was running for president and they didn’t want to charge her with a crime.
Suffice it to say that I’m ecstatic that this judge has ordered the reopening of this case. It needs to be done.