A federal court took action on the scandal surrounding Hillary Clinton’s private email use for the first time Friday when it demanded the State Department review emails Clinton submitted late last year to determine if the batch contained any that should have been released in a 2012 case.
Judge Reggie Walton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the State Department to reopen a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that had been closed in November 2014 after the agency claimed it had found no records related to the request made by transparency nonprofit Judicial Watch.
Judicial Watch first filed the open records request in September 2012, seeking documents related to a taxpayer-funded advertisement that ran on Pakistani airwaves.
The State Department claimed in a June 2013 letter that its search of Clinton’s records had turned up nothing.
But following revelations that Clinton kept her agency emails on a private server and had only submitted a portion of them when pressed by State Department officials, the court took a second look at Judicial Watch’s case earlier this year.
The agency will now comb through the 55,000 pages of emails Clinton gave them in November 2014 to determine if the cache contains any mention of the advertisement that the U.S. embassy in Islamabad produced.
Judicial Watch filed seven FOIA lawsuits for documents related to Clinton’s private emails last week alone.
One was to force the release of business-related emails that top aide Huma Abedin sent using a private account during her time in the secretary’s office.
Another sought “State Department policies, procedures and review process enacted to ensure against conflicts of interest between foreign interests and the Clinton Foundation, during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.”
According to the watchdog group, there are 18 lawsuits pending against the State Department that each involve Clinton’s private email use.
