A U.S. court has ruled on Monday in favor of a conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch’s request to depose former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about her use of a private email server to conduct official government business.
Clinton has argued that she has already answered extensive questioning about her private email server. According to Fox News, D.C. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth said that while Clinton has answered many questions, her answers have to this point been ” either incomplete, unhelpful, or cursory at best.”
“As extensive as the existing record is, it does not sufficiently explain Secretary Clinton’s state of mind when she decided it would be an acceptable practice to set up and use a private server to conduct State Department business,” Lamberth said in his Monday decision.
Lamberth said that Clinton’s responses thus far have “left many more questions than answers.”
In this most recent case, Lamberth further ruled that written answers were not sufficient to resolve questions relating to Clinton’s server.
Clinton used her private email server to house government emails during her time working for President Barrack Obama as Secretary of State. Those emails included classified documents and China may have even hacked into the server.
Clinton’s server became a point of interest ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election amid concerns that her email practices had compromised secretive information. While then-FBI Director James Comey decided in July 2016 against charging Clinton with a crime for allegedly mishandling classified information, the FBI announced additional investigations of the server in October 2016, just weeks ahead of the 2016 election.
Questions about the server, the FBI’s investigation and its justification for concluding Clinton committed no crime, have also persisted since 2016.
This most recent request to depose Clinton comes after a December 2019 status conference in which Judicial Watch noted the FBI had recently released “approximately thirty previously undisclosed Clinton emails,” and argued the State Department had “failed to fully explain” where they came from.
The State Department has reportedly been pushing for an end to the ongoing discovery efforts against Clinton, but Lamberth ruled that continuing questions about Clinton’s state of mind regarding the email server continue to delay the case’s final disposition.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton announced the new court ruling in a tweet Monday.
BREAKING: Federal Court Orders Deposition of Hillary Clinton on Emails and Benghazi Attack Records. Rules prior testimony “left many more questions than answers.” https://t.co/pvW4CD2oBS
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) March 2, 2020
Fitton’s Monday tweet references a September 2019 tweet video in which he alleges not only wrongdoing on Clinton’s part, but that the U.S. Justice and State departments helped cover for Clinton’s wrongdoing.
