Court reminds State to produce Clinton emails in ‘shortest’ time possible

[alp227]

Last edited Fri Apr 24, 2015, 07:04 PM - Edit history (1)

Source: The Hill

An appeals court gently warned the State Department on Friday to release relevant public documents quickly from among the large batch of emails Hillary Clinton turned over to the agency from her private server.

The U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia ruled the best way to handle a Freedom of Information Act case involving the emails would be to send it back to the district court, which will determine the “most efficient way to proceed under FOIA.”

“In doing so, we remind the State Department that, although it may choose of its own accord to release the emails to the public at large, it has a statutory duty to search for and produce documents responsive to FOIA requests ‘in the shortest amount of time,’ ” the three-judge panel wrote.

A controversy engulfed Clinton earlier this year when it was revealed she used a private email account during her time as secretary of State. She handed over about 55,000 pages of emails to the department last year, but she also deleted about 30,000 that she said were personal.

Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/technology/239994-court-reminds-state-to-produce-clinton-emails-in-shortest-time-possible

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court decision

Judge David Tatel - ironically a Bill Clinton nominee to the court - wrote the majority opinion, with other judges Judith W. Rogers (Clinton) and Sri Srinivasan (Obama) concurring. They happen to agree with a lawsuit filed by Larry Klayman, the racist, horrible lawyer.

[karynnj]

1. Given that the emails were given to State printed out on 55,000 pages,

it is hard to expect State to be able to efficiently extract things needed for any FOIA searches. In fact, if HRC WANTED to make searches a pain for the State Department, this is a good way to do it. - Give them non computerized, not sorted 55,000 pages of email - meaning they would need to scan them, keyword tag them, date them etc to get a database they could use for FOIA.

Add to that, the top people in the department will not blame HRC for this problem existing - because they would not want to do any damage to their party's likely nominee. Among the staff whose job it will be to process these emails - both for FOIA and for the release to the public that HRC cavalierly offered to respond to negative reaction to how she handled the email.

Not to mention, even if the State Department commits enormous resources and effort to as diligently as possible get the emails out, the public response may be the same -- that HRC would have not passed the "damaging stuff" that they assume existed. THAT is why she should have handled her email as John Kerry does. (Note - I don't want to hear anything about the rules changing. I am not speaking of "rules" - I am saying that she would have been better protected had everything been saved in a professional manner.)

Note: The exact same thing could be said of foreign government contributions to the Foundation. Had she and Bill Clinton complied with what she promised Obama and the Senate there would be no story there either.

[davidpdx]

2. Sounds like a movie plot

lawyers buried in discovery paperwork. Um...good luck with that.

[karynnj]

3. Unfortunately, it will likely be the State Department lawyers

I suspect that each request will take a huge amount of time unless the State Department has made the decision to carefully organize and archive each email. I hope that is what they have been doing, but it likely does mean that they take a hit for being slow now.

Whether timing will help or hurt Hillary, it is hard to say. The longer it takes, the closer to the election it will be. What is frustrating is that the email question gives the Growdy committee something to claim they need to investigate given that Benghazi issue itself is very very close to dead, except on the very far right. (Shades of Ken Starr's investigations leading to the unrelated Monica issue.)

At this point, we may be getting the outline of what the Republican attack will be -- that the Clintons think they are above rules. This week alone, two attacks fit that pattern. Though there appear to be no clear pattern of how previous Secretaries of State handled email, her use of a private server and then not having a process to archive the emails - either herself or at the State Department and not giving them to State when she left, when there had already been FOIAs looks secretive. The foundation story is multifold - from sensational charges that will likely be quickly rejected everywhere except on the far right where they will remain to the view that they did not abide by the agreement (not a law) with Obama on foreign contributions. There, the Obama administration will be in a weird position. However, that agreement was also important in the Senate confirmation.

This will be a nasty election if Democrats are reduced to arguing that none of this actually broke laws -- while the characterization of secretiveness and being willing to push rules to their limits is almost conceded.