The news and gossip outlet Gawker is suing the State Department to revive a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for emails it had filed to obtain three years ago — slamming the department's "Nixonian" plot to shield documents from the public.
Gawker's executive editor for investigations, John Cook, made the announcement on
C-SPAN's "Washington Journal."
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Politico reported the paperwork had been filed by Friday afternoon.
In its 2012 request, Gawker was looking for emails between Philippe Reines, who served as a spokesman for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and 34 news organizations.
"We’re filing … for those records," Cook said. "State Department has been absolutely terrible. You send a request to them and it’s clear they do not even look at it. They just reject it for whatever reason they can come up with in the hopes of making you go away, basically. And if you actually want the record that you’re entitled to, you have to fight, you have to push, and now you have to sue."
The
Associated Press also announced earlier in the week it was suing the State Department over FOIA requests dating back to 2010 for "materials related to [Clinton's] public and private calendars, correspondence involving longtime aides likely to play key roles in her expected campaign for president, and Clinton-related emails about the Osama bin Laden raid and National Security Agency surveillance practices."
Clinton has
defended her use of her private email account as a matter of "convenience," and asserts the State Department already had a lot of the material because she sent emails to colleagues who were using the official "state.gov" domain,
The Washington Post reports.
But Cook called the defense "insulting to the intelligence of the American people that she thinks that [convenience] would be a reasonable explanation for why she took the extraordinary steps of setting up an email server apparently in her home, monitored and administered outside of the bounds of a State Department team that is there to ensure the security of communications."
"It’s preposterous. The reason that they hatched the scheme was so that when I filed a FOIA request for those communications, the State Department would say we don’t have them."
"It certainly is very Nixonian, this plot," he charges.
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