In March of this year, however, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the former first lady, cabinet officer and two-time Democratic presidential candidate to sit for a deposition. Lamberth, a nominee for President Ronald Reagan who has been involved with the Clinton administration for years in a series of cases, called Hillary Clinton’s earlier responses “incomplete, not useful, or floral, at best.”
But the appeals court ruled Friday that Lamberth’s order was a “clear abuse of discretion.”
DC Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins suggested it was time to review the Clinton e-mail imbroglio to the history books.
“Secretary Clinton … gave eleven hours of public testimony before the House Select Committee, and has responded to countless media inquiries into the matter, “wrote Wilkins, a nominee for President Barack Obama. “These facts underline both the incompetence of the Order of the District Court and the ability to turn the page on the issue.”
Wilkins called the proposed topics for the Clinton depot “completely weakened from all relevant issues in this case.”
Wilkins’ 25-page opinion was joined by George W. Bush nominee Thomas Griffith and Obama nominee Nina Pillard.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the group is taking its next steps. “We are disappointed with the decision and are considering our options,” Fitton said.
Longtime Clinton attorney David Kendall offered an opportunity to make the court’s ruling public. “The opinion of the Court speaks for itself,” he said via email.
During Clinton’s four years in Obama’s cabinet, she relied on a private email account and server for both her work-related and personal messages. The practice led to a storm of controversy surrounding its 2016 presidential bid and is widely regarded as contributing to its defeat by Donald Trump.
In response to press questions during the campaign and in the affidavit, Clinton said she kept the private account and server after it was taken over in 2009 as a matter of convenience and did not avoid the Freedom of Information Act or other disclosure requirements. The FBI investigated, interviewed Clinton and recommended against criminal prosecutors, but it found dozens of reports in its account that officials said they contained highly classified information.
However, Lamberth said in his March statement that the FBI probe and representations by the State Department had not put enough questions to rest on the episode.
“To argue that the Court now has sufficient information to determine whether state has conducted an adequate search is preposterous,” Lamberth wrote.
While Clinton handed over some 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department in response to his request to return the records, Trump and other Clinton critics conducted ongoing research to track down tens of thousands of other messages that Clinton ordered destroyed after their aides determined that they were personal.
While the trove of messages Clinton returned was processed and released under FOIA during the 2016 campaign, reports continued from the FBI. Some of the messages were recovered from the email accounts of people with whom Clinton corresponded, but the State Department never provided a clear account of where all the messages originated.
“Even years after the FBI investigation, the slow trickle of new emails can still be explained,” Lamberth wrote.
Among the questions, Lamberth Clinton wanted to answer: “How did she come to believe that her e-mail from the private server would be stored by normal processes of the State Department of e-mail retention? Who told her that – if anyone – and when? Did she know that State was responding ‘no records’ to FOIA requests for her email? If so, did she suspect that she had some obligation to disclose the existence of her private server to those at state that handles the FOIA requests? … And why did she think the use of a private server to conduct State Department affairs was allowed in the first place? “
While the Justice Department opposed Judicial Watch’s request to prosecute Clinton, government attorneys opposed the move by Clinton’s attorneys to get the appellate court to block the evidence. Attorneys from the Justice Department argued that, although they saw the depot as unnecessary, the order of the judge requesting it was not as wrong as intervening by the DC Circuit.
In his March directive, Lamberth also ordered a depot for Clinton’s former chief of staff at the State Department, Cheryl Mills. The DC Circuit panel denied, for technical reasons, Mills’ deposition in its ruling Friday.
Wilkins, however, suggested that the rationale for requiring her to testify was similar shortcomings and the decision opened up the possibility that she could seek relief from the appeal court in the future by defending the deposit scheme.
