State Department officials are battling a pair of Freedom of Information Act requests for emails and memos that discuss the agency’s temporary inspector general and the influence Hillary Clinton and her staff may have had on his oversight of the agency.
Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit, also sought any documentation of high-level discussions about a February 2013 inspector general report published just as Clinton exited the State Department in the FOIA requests it filed in September of last year.
The State Department argued Friday the “nature and scope” of the group’s requests were too broad to estimate how many records might have mentioned the interim inspector general, the controversial report or a Government Accountability Office report from April 2011 that raised many of the same concerns about allowing a temporary watchdog to head the agency.
State Department officials noted in the court filings that they expect to finish digitizing the 55,000 printed pages of emails Clinton turned over to the agency last year by mid-June.
But the State Department said it had been ordered by the court to delay posting Clinton’s emails on its website until it searched them for records related to another FOIA lawsuit — this one involving allegations that the presidential candidate and top members of her staff strategically leaked information about Israel to a New York Times reporter.
According to the 2013 inspector general report in question, the agency’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security Special Investigation Division was susceptible to “undue influence” from senior State Department officials.
Investigators with the diplomatic security office faced “a significant potential for undue influence, favoritism, and potential retribution,” the report said.
“[S]ome [investigators] had indeed felt such pressure,” the inspector general wrote.
Lawmakers have questioned why the State Department opted to leave the inspector general position empty for more than five years, creating the longest such vacancy in the history of any federal agency.
Harold Geisel served as the agency’s interim inspector general from January 2008 to June 2013, when President Obama nominated a permanent State watchdog just months after Clinton left office.
The 2011 GAO report expressed concerns “that a permanent IG has not been appointed at the State Department for almost 3 years.” Citizens United sought discussions of that report in its original request.
David Bossie, president of Citizens United, said the FOIA requests sought to determine whether the temporary inspector general’s office was “politicized” by Clinton staffers.
“It seems that Secretary Clinton and her team wanted to keep Geisel in that role,” Bossie said. “Why they wanted to is one of the things we want to look into with this investigation.”
He dismissed the State Department’s claim that the requests were too broad to answer in a timely manner.
“We have a very narrow FOIA that’s not even remotely broad,” Bossie said. “It is about a specific IG, why he was kept in office, and versions of a single report.”
Bossie pointed to the difficulty Citizens United and other groups have faced in extracting potentially embarrassing documents from the State Department.
“The only way to get documents out of the State Department is to go to court to force them to release material,” Bossie said. “They’re playing beat the clock. That’s why, over a year ago, we were FOIA-ing her emails and FOIA-ing communications between State and the Clinton Foundation.”
The State Department is presently fending off 86 separate FOIA lawsuits, court documents show. That’s a significant increase from the 29 cases it faced in all of 2014, according to the FOIA Project.
Citizens United was thrust into the national spotlight in 2008 when the government attempted to block the television premiere of its documentary about Clinton, “Hillary: The Movie.”
The ensuing Supreme Court case resulted in the removal of restrictions on political spending by nonprofit corporations.
Bossie said the inspector general-related FOIA requests — as well at the 20 others his group has filed to the State Department — were made in the course of researching a sequel to “Hillary: The Movie” that will air before the 2016 elections.
