A three-judge appeals court panel ruled that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can dodge a sworn deposition from a conservative watchdog group, reversing a lower court decision that had ordered the sworn testimony about her private email server during her time at the State Department.
Clinton, who appealed the order from earlier this year requiring she and her former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, sit down for depositions, scored the legal victory in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Friday.
“The mere suspicion of bad faith on the part of the government cannot be used as a dragnet to authorize voluminous discovery that is irrelevant to the remaining issues in a case,” said the 25-page ruling authored by Obama appointee Judge Robert Wilkins. “The District Court has impermissibly ballooned the scope of its inquiry into allegations of bad faith to encompass a continued probe of Secretary Clinton’s state of mind surrounding actions taken years before the at-issue searches were conducted by the State Department. Secretary Clinton has already answered interrogatories from Judicial Watch on these very questions in the case before Judge Sullivan, explaining the sole reason she used the private account was for convenience.”
Judicial Watch had argued the depositions were necessary to understand whether Clinton attempted to avoid the Freedom of Information Act when she improperly used a private server to conduct her State Department business and to figure out whether the agency adequately searched for all her emails. After a district court judge agreed with the watchdog group, Clinton appealed the decision. Judicial Watch, Justice Department lawyers representing the State Department, and Clinton’s legal team all made their case in June to a trio of appeals court judges, who then granted the 2016 Democratic nominee’s petition for a writ of mandamus.
The ruling Friday said Clinton won’t have to answer Judicial Watch’s questions under oath. The ruling did not apply to Mills.
“We’re disappointed by the decision and considering our options,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told the Washington Examiner.
U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth issued a ruling in March that granted Judicial Watch’s request to depose Clinton. “It is time to hear directly from Secretary Clinton,” the judge said at the time.
Wilkins, who was joined in his Friday decision by Obama appointee Nina Pillard and George W. Bush appointee Thomas Griffith, said Lamberth was wrong. “Discovery in FOIA cases is not a punishment, and the district court has no basis to order further inquiry into Secretary Clinton’s state of mind … Especially in light of Judicial Watch’s present access to extensive information responsive to its proposed deposition topics, the deposition of Secretary Clinton, if allowed to proceed, at best seems likely to stray into topics utterly unconnected with the instant FOIA suit, and at worst could be used as a vehicle for harassment or embarrassment,” he wrote.
Judicial Watch 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.
The appeals court noted on Friday that Clinton had been long gone by the time the State Department conducted its FOIA-related email search and pointed to the fact that “several executive agencies and a House Select Committee have conducted inquiries” into Clinton’s use of a private email server and that Clinton had “also provided eleven hours of public testimony before the House Select Committee” and “has answered countless media inquiries on the matter.”
“It is certainly within the authority of the district court to hear from the agency head herself about whether there was intent,” Judicial Watch attorney Ramona Cotca told the appeals court in June, saying that Clinton wanted to “short-circuit this process by using the most potent weapon in the judicial arsenal to prevent the district court from ever being able to reach a determination of whether there was ever an adequate search.”
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 2013. Although former FBI Director James Comey found Clinton was “extremely careless” in handling classified emails, no criminal charges were recommended against anyone following the bureau’s “Midyear Exam” investigation. Clinton’s IT team deleted 33,000 supposedly non-work-related emails.
“Why is it that four years after the FBI closed its investigation that there are still additional Clinton emails that are being produced. Why were they not searched or produced or located earlier?” Cotca asked, later adding, “Even today, the State Department does not know what is the universe of Clinton emails from the State Department — that is the significant issue here.”
The Judicial Watch lawyer said deposing Clinton would help determine if she had tried to “thwart FOIA.”
Mark Freeman, the Justice Department attorney representing the State Department, said in June that the Trump administration didn’t support Clinton’s petition for mandamus.
“The State Department’s approach to all of these [Clinton] cases from the beginning has just been to get through them — to respond to the FOIA requests, to push through any district court litigation, and to bring all these cases, and indeed the entire chapter, to a close,” Freeman said.
David Kendall, Clinton’s attorney, who was also appearing for Mills, told the appeals court judges that “the real purpose” of the depositions “is harassment.”
A State Department review of email practices of dozens of former agency officials and aides to Clinton 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.”
