Documents filed in Freedom of Information Act lawsuits have offered rare glimpses into how the State Department is managing Hillary Clinton’s records, many of which came to the agency years after her departure in the form of private emails.
For example, a letter filed Monday in federal court indicated the FBI’s probe includes “law enforcement efforts” and is focusing specifically on Clinton’s use of a private server.
The acknowledgement by James Baker, general counsel for the FBI, undermined Clinton’s argument that the probe was nothing more than a routine “security review,” as she has maintained since July. The FBI’s letter also cast doubt on Clinton’s suggestion that her situation is similar to that of Colin Powell, who was found to have kept two potentially classified emails in his private inbox.
However, Powell used a commercial email account, not a private server. The FBI specified agents have focused in on the use of a private server.
Documents filed late Friday in a FOIA lawsuit revealed the State Department had “retired” 2,500 potentially relevant documents from a set of files shared by Clinton’s top staff.
The lawsuit sought “records that identify the policies and/or procedures in place to ensure that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s personal or charitable financial relationships with foreign leaders, foreign governments, and business entities posed no conflict of interest to her role as Secretary of State.”
It also sought “any and all records concerning, regarding, or related to State Department review of donations to the Clinton Foundation for potential conflicts of interest with former Secretary Clinton’s role as Secretary of State.”
Because the 2,500 “retired” documents had been removed from the secretary of state’s office and transferred to a different office within the State Department, agency officials said they initially overlooked the documents when conducting searches for the FOIA request.
Those documents, some of which belonged to top Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan, were taken from the secretary of state’s office in April of last year.
But Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, filed the FOIA request for those documents in March 2015, a full month before agency officials removed the documents and relegated them to a separate section of the State Department.
In July of last year, Judge Rudolph Contreras, the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the lawsuit, said he was “a little bit mystified that the government is not more forthcoming in just answering questions that will help this case proceed.”
The State Department has attempted several tactics to stall the case.
Last year, officials argued they couldn’t simultaneously respond to both the Judicial Watch case and a lawsuit over Clinton’s emails filed by Jason Leopold of Vice News, which ultimately forced the agency to produce all 55,000 pages of Clinton’s emails.
They then argued the State Department had no legal obligation to request the private emails of Mills, Sullivan and Huma Abedin, another top Clinton aide, because those records weren’t already in their system.
Finally, they told the court the agency had discovered “thousands” of responsive documents, but took another month to specify how many and why those records weren’t included in the initial batch of documents set to be searched by State officials.
FOIA litigation has raised the question of whether deleted emails found on Clinton’s private server, which the FBI seized in August, should be included among the records subject to review under existing FOIA requests.
While the State Department argued it has no responsibility to coordinate with the FBI in an effort to recover and search those deleted emails, FOIA requesters have said the roughly 30,000 emails Clinton erased from her server should be considered official records subject to the same searches as the 30,000 emails she gave the government.
In the high-profile case filed by Leopold, State Department officials delayed a court-ordered deadline by an entire month after overlooking more than 2,000 pages of emails that still needed outside review.
