Judge unloads on DOJ and State Department in Clinton email scandal

Politico:

The email controversy that dogged Hillary Clinton through much of the 2016 presidential race could well be kicking around through the 2020 contest after a federal judge ordered additional fact-finding into whether Clinton’s use of the private email system was a deliberate effort to thwart the Freedom of Information Act.

In a scathing opinion issued Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth said that despite FBI, inspector general and congressional investigations into Clinton’s use of a private account for all her email traffic during her four years as secretary of state, the conservative group Judicial Watch should be permitted to demand documents and additional testimony about the practice.

Lamberth, who has clashed with Clinton and her aides in cases dating back to her husband’s administration, was unsparing in his assessment of the former secretary’s actions. He blasted Clinton’s email practices as “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”

Lamberth also again expressed concerns that lawyers at the Justice Department and the State Department misled the court when they tried at the end of 2014 to wrap up Judicial Watch’s FOIA suit about Benghazi talking points even though some officials were aware months earlier that Clinton had tens of thousands of emails on a private system and had agreed to turn many of them over to State at its request.

“State played this card close to its chest,” the judge complained. “At best, State’s attempts to pass-off its deficient search as legally adequate during settlement negotiations was negligence born out of incompetence. At worst, career employees in the State and Justice Departments colluded to scuttle public scrutiny of Clinton, skirt FOIA and hoodwink this court.”
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The judge suggested that some State Department and Justice Department employees friendly to Clinton might have been trying to keep the emails from the public. He noted that messages eventually released by the State Department showed Clinton telling her daughter, Chelsea, that the assault in Benghazi, Libya, was a terrorist attack, even though the Obama administration long maintained that it was not.

Justice Department lawyers have argued that they had no legal duty to search records not in the State Department’s possession at the time a FOIA request was made, and that lawyers actually working on the suit before Lamberth didn’t have as much information about what Clinton turned over as did more senior officials.

However, Lamberth disputed State’s narrow view of its legal duties.

“Legally, it is wrong,” he wrote, noting precedents (one of them his own) saying that records wrongfully removed from an agency may have to be searched wherever they are.
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I think the DOJ exoneration of Clinton was a travesty that also needs investigating.  It is beginning to look like a deep state scheme to exonerate Hillary Clinton and at the same time, the DOJ was trying to make up a bogus case of Russian collusion against Trump.  It looks like a corrupt stew of mischief.