>Judge orders Justice, State departments to reopen narrow inquiry into handling of Clinton email records lawsuit
>A U.S. judge ordered the Justice and State departments Thursday to reopen an inquiry into whether Hillary Clinton used a private email server while secretary of state to deliberately evade public records laws and to answer whether the agencies acted in bad faith by not telling a court for months that they had asked in mid-2014 for missing emails to be returned.
>In a narrow but sharply worded 10-page opinion, Lamberth wrote that despite the government’s claimed presumption of transparency, “faced with one of the gravest modern offenses to government openness, [the Obama administration’s] State and Justice departments fell far short” of the law’s requirements in a lawsuit for documents.
>Lamberth added that despite President Trump’s repeated campaign attacks against Clinton for not making her emails public, “the current Justice Department made things worse” by taking the position that agencies are not obliged to search for records not in the government’s possession when a FOIA request is made.
>Conservative legal watchdog group Judicial Watch filed its FOIA lawsuit in July 2014 seeking State Department talking points issued after the September 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, that left a U.S. ambassador dead.
>The suit came months before news broke in March 2015 that Clinton exclusively used a private email account as secretary from 2009 to 2013.
>Between July 2014 and March 2015, the State Department said in court filings that its document searches were adequate and did not mention unsearched records as it proposed to settle the case.
>The agencies later acknowledged that additional searches would be needed, without disclosing that it had received 30,000 emails returned by Clinton.
>At best, Lamberth said the government’s actions reflect “negligence born of incompetence,” adding, “At worst, career employees in the State and Justice departments colluded to scuttle public scrutiny of Clinton, skirt FOIA, and hoodwink this court.”
>Lamberth ordered the government’s attorneys to meet with Judicial Watch and by Dec. 17 propose to answer additional questions into whether “Clinton used a private email to stymie FOIA, whether State’s attempts to settle the case in 2014 and 2015 amounted to bad faith, and whether State’s subsequent searches have been adequate.”
http://archive.is/wvHOV