State Dept. Stalls Again on Clinton Documents

I suspect liberal media interest in the Clinton email scandal will fade, but the public interest will remain high in securing accountability under the rule of law. Indeed, the day before the election, Judicial Watch lawyers were in federal court again pushing for Clinton email discourse in a key Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking emails sent or received by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her official capacity during her tenure as secretary of state.

The State Department has been producing Clinton email recovered by the FBI under a Sept. 23, 2016, court order issued by U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg. The State Department confirmed in September that the FBI turned over to the State Department at least 15,000 new Clinton emails as a result of Judicial Watch’s litigation seeking all of Clinton’s work-related emails.

At the hearing Monday, we found out that the FBI also turned over 31,000 other Clinton documents to the State Department. State suggested the court should wait as long as five years to see them. Obviously, the State Department is slow-walking the release of Hillary Clinton’s deleted and hidden emails. Ironically, this Clinton/Obama State Department stonewalling has guaranteed that the Clinton email scandal won’t be resolved for years.

The court has set the next hearing in this case for Nov. 29 to discuss the status of 650,000 emails reportedly found on the computing devices of Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner. Let’s see . . . the FBI reviewed 650,000 emails from computing devices of Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner in just eight days, but the State Department says it will take five years to process 31,000 pages?

It doesn’t look like the court is buying the State Department’s time line, but we won’t know for sure until March. In the meantime, I wonder if the Trump transition team understands undoing this type of corruption is something they have to prioritize.

The criminal nature of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal was highlighted further last week by the State Department’s release of 74 additional emails recovered by the FBI in its investigation of Clinton’s use of a non-state.gov email system.

Included in the new documents was an email in which Clinton forwarded classified information to her daughter, Chelsea, at the unsecure email address dreynolds@clintonemail.com.

Before releasing the heavily redacted email to Judicial Watch, the State Department marked it “B1.4(b)” and “B1.4(d),” indicating that it contained “Foreign Government Information’ and “Foreign relations or foreign activities of the US including confidential sources.” The State Department also misleadingly labeled the email with the term “near duplicate.”

No wonder Hillary Clinton deleted this email. Her sharing of classified information with her daughter shows criminal disregard for national security.

Tom Fitton is the president of Judicial Watch. He is a nationally recognized expert on government corruption. A former talk radio and television host and analyst, Tom is well known across the country as a national spokesperson for the conservative cause. He has been quoted in Time, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and most every other major newspaper in the country. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.