Internal State Department documents from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state have slowly made their way to the public through the Freedom of Information Act as Congress fights to reform what many see as a broken transparency law.
A high-profile lawsuit between Vice News and the State Department over the agency’s failure to respond adequately to a FOIA request prompted the court ruling last week that will force the agency to release batches of Clinton’s private emails every 30 days.
Other groups, such as Citizens United, Judicial Watch, Veterans for a Strong America and the Associated Press, have also sued the State Department over stonewalled records requests, with varying degrees of success.
“The only way to get documents out of the State Department is to go to court to force them to release material,” said David Bossie, president of Citizens United.
Among a number of Clinton-related records, Citizens United has requested emails and memos that discuss the temporary inspector general that presided over the State Department during the former first lady’s tenure as secretary of state.
Judicial Watch, which has filed dozens of FOIA requests related to Clinton’s time as secretary of state, forced the release of documents that showed intelligence officials quickly knew the 2012 terror attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi was premeditated.
The right-leaning nonprofit also used FOIA to uncover hundreds of State Department ethics reviews involving Bill Clinton’s paid speaking engagements in other countries.
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said FOIA lawsuits force agencies to explain what documents they’re withholding and why, which doesn’t always happen in a congressional inquiry.
“Congress has a political process,” Fitton said. “Even though they have the power to subpoena, it’s a political negotiation.”
“If they’re stonewalled, it becomes a question of political will to force the release of documents,” he added.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi, which brought to light Clinton’s reliance on a private email and server to conduct her government affairs, the State Department inspector general and the agency itself have thus far done little to bring the presidential candidate’s records to the public.
Much of the information about Clinton’s conduct that has emerged in recent weeks has been the result of FOIA requests and litigation.
After the presidential candidate announced via Twitter — and again on the campaign trail — that she wanted the public to read her emails and had asked the State Department to release them, the agency announced plans to publish the documents using FOIA standards and exemptions.
Jason Leopold, the investigative reporter for Vice News whose FOIA lawsuit has forced the rolling production of Clinton emails, said the agency’s independent decision to release emails under FOIA provisions seemed “somewhat unusual.”
“They’re sort of saying, ‘we’re just going to apply this standard to all these emails and hope that everyone will be satisfied,'” Leopold said.
A major reason groups like Vice News felt compelled to sue the State Department over FOIA requests despite its pledge to release the emails independently is the redactions officials will undoubtedly make using FOIA, Leopold noted.
“If we were to just accept that they were just going to put this up there, how would we challenge those redactions when they come out?” he said.
Government officials are permitted to withhold information from documents they release through FOIA requests under nine exemptions that cover everything from national security concerns to internal “deliberations.”
Leopold said he still does not expect any “smoking guns” to appear in the documents he will receive through his lawsuit.
“Hillary Clinton and her team chose which emails to turn over. And it’s really important to emphasize that,” he said. “She destroyed emails she felt were nonresponsive or were personal. That, in a way, circumvents the ability for us as journalists to obtain records and have an independent party review it.”
In November of last year, Clinton gave the State Department 55,000 printed pages of emails she deemed relevant to her work as secretary of state and reportedly deleted the rest.
Many of those emails have been subjected to review by the Benghazi Committee, which appeared to have leaked several hundred pages of records to the New York Times just hours before the State Department published its first batch of redacted emails.
Daniel Epstein, executive director of nonpartisan watchdog Cause of Action, said the Benghazi Committee has likely obtained scores of documents it has decided not to release to the public.
“They don’t want the media to adjudicate these issues,” Epstein said.
“You may leak certain documents at opportune times because getting the media to talk about an issue is helpful to put pressure on a target,” Epstein said. “But you don’t want your target to know all the information you may be aware of.”
Epstein said FOIA requesters often have “different incentives” than congressional investigators. He said the barrage of FOIA lawsuits against the State Department often fail to produce documents “when you have an agency whose incentive is to obfuscate the truth.”
Sean Davis, co-founder of the Federalist and former chief investigator for Sen. Tom Coburn, agreed that the motivation of the Benghazi Committee is different than that of the typical FOIA requester.
“In the instance of Trey Gowdy’s committee, they’re doing a full-on investigation, so their interest is not in immediately dumping online everything they get,” Davis said. “So if you look at it that way, it makes sense that a group like Judicial Watch would be seeing information come through that channel [FOIA] a lot more quickly than the committee.”
The State Department inspector general has declined to probe allegations of misconduct surrounding Clinton’s four years at the agency.
Davis said the failure of the inspector general to take up Clinton-related issues is indicative of a broader problem affecting government watchdogs.
“What you’ve seen over the last six, seven years is what appears to be a pretty severe loss of independence of these IGs, where rather than acting on behalf of taxpayers, they end up acting on behalf of the politicians who appointed them,” he said.
In August, 47 inspectors general signed an open letter to Congress lamenting the many hurdles they face when trying to get information from the agencies they oversee.
Lawmakers have questioned why the State Department opted to leave the inspector general position empty from January 2008 to June 2013, creating the longest such vacancy in the history of any federal agency.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will hold the first of a two-part hearing Tuesday on the many ways agencies stonewall FOIA requesters looking to extract documents from the government.
Leopold and Fitton will be among the witnesses testifying about shortcomings in the transparency law.
