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The FBI's year-long investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server uncovered 14,900 emails and documents from her time as secretary of state that had not been disclosed by her attorneys, and a federal judge on Monday pressed the State Department to begin releasing emails sooner than mid-October as it planned.
Justice Department lawyers said last week that the State Department would review and turn over Clinton's work-related emails to a conservative legal group. The records are among "tens of thousands" of documents found by the FBI in its probe and turned over to the State Department, Justice Department attorney Lisa Ann Olson said Monday in court.
The 14,900 Clinton documents are nearly 50 percent more than the roughly 30,000 emails that Clinton's lawyers deemed work-related and returned to the department in December 2014.
Lawyers for the State Department and Judicial Watch, the legal group, are negotiating a plan for the release of the emails in a civil public records lawsuit before U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg of Washington.
In a statement after a hearing at the U.S. district courthouse in Washington, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said the group was pleased that Boasberg rejected the department's proposal to begin releasing documents weekly on Oct. 14, ordering it instead to prioritize Clinton's emails and to return to court Sept. 22 with a new plan.
"We're pleased the court accelerated the State Department's timing," Fitton said. "We're trying to work with the State Department here, but let's be clear: They have slow-walked and stonewalled the release of these records. They've had many of them since July 25 ... and not one record has yet been released, and we don't understand why that's the case."
(Score: 5, Informative) by DECbot on Friday August 26 2016, @02:47PM
I completely agree with your assessment. Clinton cannot be nailed for having classified material as she has the authority to determine what is classified and the connections to ensure she won't be caught with classified materials.
However, where she might be in hot water is the Federal Records Act. She has a responsibility to Congress to keep documents created during her tenure and turn over those documents to Congress. This of course includes email. Using a private email address for official government business is in direct violation of that act. Hillary argues that precedence allowed her to use a private email address as previous Secretaries of the State used private corporate addresses. However, my thought differs on a few counts.
Americans feel that she has violated the law in regards to classified records. If she had less authority than Secretary of State, she would be breaking the law. Comely is correct that you can prosecute as she has the authority to declassify any State department document on her server, and has the friends to declassify any non-State department document on her server. However, there should be a probe into how she complied with the Records Act. Turning over documents at the end of her tenure does not ensure that she is in compliance. Where are the logs of the emails received? There should be a count of the number of incoming emails and the number of out going emails. Do these numbers remotely match the number of emails turned over to Congress? And was there audits of the server during her tenure to ensure that logs aren't being tampered and emails are periodically and adequately archived? If she had an exception to use a private server for government work, these metrics would need to be in place during her tenure to ensure compliance to the law. Anything less is gross or willful negligence of the law and should be easily prosecuted.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base