State Department officials should be ordered by a federal court to disclose to it and a nonprofit watchdog what they have done to comply with the law in responding to the organization’s Freedom of Information Act request for documents on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email to conduct official diplomatic business.
“The State Department has yet to demonstrate how it is satisfying its obligations under FOIA in light of recent revelations that Secretary Clinton’s emails were not being properly managed, retained and produced,” Judicial Watch told U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth in a filing made public Thursday.
“This also applies to emails received or sent by other officials or employees within the Secretary’s office to conduct government business who used non-‘state.gov’ email addresses. To determine the adequacy of the State Department’s search, both Judicial Watch and the Court should be informed by the department directly of the details surrounding the retention of agency emails within the Office of the Secretary and the extent of the department’s ability to search, request and retrieve those records,” the nonprofit said.
The organization’s comments were in response to a Justice Department statement to the court that there was no need for the court conference Judicial Watch requested March 17 to get an explanation for the government’s delays in producing documents the nonprofit requested in a May 2014 FOIA. That request was for all documents, including emails, concerning Clinton and the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.
Clinton confirmed in a March 10 news conference at the U.N. a New York Times report that she used a private email account and a server located in her New York residence to send and receive thousands of emails concerning official business throughout her tenure as Secretary of State.
She also said she reviewed an estimated 30,000 emails to determine if they were personal or official before deleting them. She gave State Department officials 55,000 pages of official emails, which are now being reviewed by the government.
Federal laws and regulations require federal employees to ensure their departments and agencies have copies of all official emails they sent using a private email account. State Department officials have said Clinton did not sign a required form affirming that she did so when she resigned.
Judicial Watch fears some or all of Clinton’s emails regarding Benghazi could be or have already been lost.
“Time is of the essence in this case. The statement by former Secretary Clinton during a press conference that she did not preserve approximately 30,000 emails she sent or received through her non-‘state.gov’ email address she used exclusively to conduct government business is a matter of public record — not [as the State Department alleged] ‘conjecture.’
“Only last week, the State Department publically [sic] disclosed that it was unable to automatically archive the emails of most of its senior officials until last month. This is also a matter of public record — not conjecture. The State Department has still not informed the court or Judicial Watch whether it has undertaken any efforts to retrieve agency emails from non-‘state.gov’ email addresses used by other officials or employees within the Office of the Secretary during the relevant time period or from other employees within the agency.”
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton accused the Obama administration of committing “fraud, misconduct and misrepresentation” about Clinton emails in its response to the federal court.
“Our independent litigation exposed the email scandal and just forced, for the first time, the Obama administration to admit accountability for at least some of the records Hillary Clinton concealed from the American people,” Fitton said.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
