Hillary Clinton asked an appeals court on Friday to overturn a judge’s order for her to appear for a sworn deposition about her use of a private email server and the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack.
The case stems from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the conservative watchdog Judicial Watch against the former secretary of state. Earlier this month, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ruled, “The Court agrees with Judicial Watch — it is time to hear directly from Secretary Clinton.” The judicial opinion also ordered former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills to be deposed.
Clinton’s legal team responded with an 83-page petition for a writ of mandamus filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, calling the district ruling outrageous and asking the appeals court to order the lower court to correct the ruling.
The legal team for Clinton said reversing the order “is warranted because Judicial Watch’s impending depositions of Secretary Clinton and Ms. Mills are inappropriate, unnecessary, and a clear abuse of discretion.”
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, “This desperate act is yet another attempt by the Clinton machine to delay truth and accountability for her email conduct and how it impacted the people’s ‘right to know’ under FOIA.”
Clinton’s lead attorney David Kendall said, “The district court’s order inappropriately discounts this Court’s prior finding that there are no remaining recoverable emails, the extraordinary discovery that Judicial Watch has already obtained, and the vast public record on Secretary Clinton’s emails.” He claimed, “Judicial Watch could not possibly show the extraordinary circumstances required to depose (or re-depose) former high-ranking officials regarding their reasons for taking official actions, and the court abused its discretion in finding otherwise.”
The Clinton team laid out three main arguments for why the lower court’s order should be reversed. First, they referenced a prior D.C. appeals court ruling in a Judicial Watch v. Pompeo case in 2018 that they said should render this FOIA case “moot.” Next, they claimed the district court’s order “violates the well-established principle that high-ranking government officials should not be subjected to depositions absent extraordinary circumstances.” And they claimed the lower court “lacked jurisdiction to order additional discovery because the FOIA requests were submitted only after Secretary Clinton left office.”
The district court ruling earlier this month was the latest twist in a nearly six-year-long case related to Clinton’s reasons for setting up her unauthorized private email server and whether she was attempting to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests.
Lamberth listed some remaining questions for Clinton: “How did she arrive at her belief that her private server emails would be preserved by normal State Department processes for email retention? … Did she realize State was giving ‘no records’ responses to her FOIA requests for emails? … And why did she think that using a private server to conduct State Department business was permissible under the law in the first place?”
The FBI investigated Clinton’s use of the server, hosted in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, New York, while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2014. Although former FBI Director James Comey found that Clinton was “extremely careless” in handling classified emails, no criminal charges were recommended against anyone following the bureau’s “Midyear Exam” investigation.
“Judicial Watch argued that Secretary Clinton’s existing testimony has only scratched the surface of the inquiry into her motives for setting up and using a private server,” Lamberth said.
The judge said Clinton’s written answers to questions in this case and related ones “were either incomplete, unhelpful, or cursory at bes,” and that “her responses left many more questions than answers.”
A State Department review related to its email practices found 91 “valid violations” attributable to 38 individuals and another 497 violations that couldn’t be tied to any specific person. The review found “some instances” of classified information being “inappropriately introduced into an unclassified system.” But investigators uncovered “no persuasive evidence of systematic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”
Nearly a dozen witnesses have been deposed as part of Judicial Watch’s FOIA lawsuits stemming back to 2014. One main controversy is why 33,000 of her emails were deleted despite a congressional preservation order. The FBI was only able to recover about 5,000 of the scrubbed emails.
Clinton claimed she “never received nor sent any material that was marked classified,” but Comey announced in July 2016 that 110 emails did contain classified information.
Judicial Watch also wants to question Clinton and Mills about the talking points for former United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice’s appearances on television shows following the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Members of Ansar al Sharia launched a coordinated assault on Sept. 11, 2012, killing U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, foreign service officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. Clinton, Rice, and others incorrectly blamed the attack on a YouTube video.
