The District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals has revived lawsuits against Hillary Clinton due to her camp’s use of a private server to handle government emails and other sensitive documents.
The lawsuits were filed by the watchdog groups Cause of Action and Judicial Watch in 2015 to prompt Secretary of State John Kerry and David Ferriero of the National Archives to forward the email issue to the Justice Department. Doing so, the department will be able to file a civil suit against Clinton in order to retrieve the missing email records.
“Secretary of State Clinton used private email accounts during her time at the State Department,” Senior Circuit Judge Stephen Williams stated in the court opinion. “As a result, some emails were not preserved in government recordkeeping systems.”
“Although the current Secretary (with the help of the National Archivist) has made efforts to recover those emails, neither the Secretary nor the Archivist has asked the Attorney General to initiate enforcement proceedings, as provided for in the Federal Records Act,” Williams continued.
Back in December of 2014, the State Department had already required Clinton to turn over about 54,000 pages of messages. But, she also deleted thousands of emails that her lawyers labeled as private.
Up to now, Clinton’s camp is still being questioned if it was able to disclose all documents and messages that were handled through a non-government server. Recently, FBI Director James Comey revealed that the agency came across a new batch of emails that were stored in the computer of disgraced Representative Anthony Weiner, the disgraced husband of Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s most trusted aides.
Although Williams did not directly address the recently discovered emails in the court opinion, that fact that a new batch was discovered opens up the possibility that many more are yet to be disclosed. Hopefully, through the revived lawsuits, the Justice Department will be able to conduct a follow-up on the case against Clinton.
