While the special counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury for the Russia probe, Kim Jong-un flexes his muscles with his nukes, and Democrats continue to run around in circles—an Obama-appointed federal judge has ordered the State Department to conduct another search for Hillary Clinton’s missing Benghazi emails (via The Hill):
U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the State Department had not done enough to try to track down messages Clinton may have sent about the assault on the U.S. diplomatic compound on Sept. 11, 2012 — an attack that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.
In response to Freedom of Information Act requests, State searched the roughly 30,000 messages Clinton turned over to her former agency at its request in December 2014 after officials searching for Benghazi-related records realized she had used a personal email account during her four-year tenure as secretary.
State later searched tens of thousands of emails handed over to the agency by three former top aides to Clinton: Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan. Finally, State searched a collection of emails the FBI assembled when it was investigating Clinton's use of the private account and server.
In all, State found 348 Benghazi-related messages or documents that were sent to or from Clinton in a period of nearly five months after the attack.
However, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch argued that the search wasn't good enough because State never tried to search its own systems for relevant messages in the official email accounts of Clinton's top aides.
In a 10-page ruling issued Tuesday, Mehta — an Obama appointee — agreed.
This all circles back to the former first lady’s private email system, which Clinton used while serving as secretary of state. The homebrew server was kept at her private residence, where all of her official work was conducted while she served as our secretary of state under Barack Obama. The establishment of the system was not unauthorized by State Department officials and if Clinton had asked for approval—it would have been turned down.
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While the server was seen as a nothing burger among the Clintonites, it rehashed all of the detrimental character attacks against her from the 1990s. The former first lady was quickly seen as untrustworthy and dishonest with voters, with whom she never recovered after this dive on character issues. It also didn’t help that the former secretary of state’s story about the server kept being debunked. Yes, classified information was sent through the server. Yes, three emails that were marked classified at the time they were sent or received went through her server, though former FBI Director James Comey said that the communications were not marked properly. It was not allowed. Period. Also, she deleted 30,000 emails that she said were not work-related, a violation of the Federal Records Act.
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