A reporter whose Freedom of Information Act litigation forced the State Department to release all copies of Hillary Clinton’s private emails at the end of each month is now turning his focus to the Justice Department, which is leading an investigation into Clinton’s private server.
Jason Leopold, a reporter with Vice News, sued the Department of Justice Tuesday over an unanswered FOIA request for copies of Clinton’s emails that were recovered off her private server.
The FBI took Clinton’s server into custody in August after a pair of inspectors general warned that the former secretary of state may have transmitted material classified as high as “top secret” on her private email network.
In documents filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court, Leopold cited a New York Times article from September that found FBI officials had recovered “work-related and personal emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton said had been deleted from the server that housed the personal account she used exclusively when she was secretary of state, according to two government officials.”
Clinton has repeatedly argued the roughly 30,000 emails she deleted off her server were personal in nature and therefore not subject to federal record-keeping requirements.
However, the New York Times report and others have suggested investigators pulled an unknown number of deleted, official emails off the confiscated server.
Leopold’s November FOIA request also sought internal communications between officials at the FBI and the State Department, as well as discussions about the server between Clinton or her attorneys and anyone at the FBI.
The Vice reporter’s previous FOIA lawsuit forced the State Department to begin high-profile releases of Clinton’s private emails at the end of every month until Jan. 2016, when the agency is required to have posted all 55,000 pages of the former secretary of state’s emails online.
Justice Department officials have remained largely silent about the politically-charged probe of Clinton’s email network, speaking up only to discourage the few leaks that have surfaced in the media.
The FBI has not laid out a timeline for the completion of the investigation.
