First, it was the CFO of the Clinton Foundation, turning state’s evidence against Bill and Hillary and now a federal judge wants the FBI and the DOJ to give him an answer on whether Hillary set up a private server to illegally conceal her communications.
Normally, I would say the FBI and the DOJ would come back exonerating Clinton, but with six thousand pages of documents, many of which prove a quid pro quo between Hillary and Clinton Foundation donors, I’m not so sure.
Especially since the judge is U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, who is livid with the FBI, DOJ and the State Department, who have been stonewalling him until his -patience ran out completely.
U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ruled in a scathing opinion that conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch should be permitted access to documents it requested as part of a 2014 FOIA request relating to the State Department’s response to the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack.
The judge characterized Clinton’s use of a private email server as “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”
Additionally, Lamberth said Judicial Watch should be given testimony about the State Department’s failure to be transparent regarding what officials knew concerning Clinton’s private emails at the time the FOIA request was initially processed.
Lamberth wrote:
“State played this card close to its chest. At best, State’s attempts to pass-off its deficient search as legally adequate during settlement negotiations was negligence born out of incompetence. At worst, career employees in the State and Justice Departments colluded to scuttle public scrutiny of Clinton, skirt FOIA and hoodwink this court.”
Politico reported
The judge suggested that some State Department and Justice Department employees friendly to Clinton might have been trying to keep the emails from the public. He noted that messages eventually released by the State Department showed Clinton telling her daughter, Chelsea, that the assault in Benghazi, Libya, was a terrorist attack, even though the Obama administration long maintained that it was not.
Justice Department lawyers have argued that they had no legal duty to search records not in the State Department’s possession at the time a FOIA request was made and that lawyers actually working on the suit before Lamberth didn’t have as much information about what Clinton turned over as did more senior officials.