Congressional Republicans have issued subpoenas to three technology companies that either made or serviced the private email server that Hillary Clinton used while she was secretary of state.
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Democrats accuse Republicans of wasting millions on fruitless investigations of Clinton, following the GOP’s failure to uncover evidence supporting their claims Clinton was negligent in the deadly 2012 attack on a US diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya.
Amit P. Mehta, the federal judge overseeing the Judicial Watch lawsuit, ordered the State Department to begin releasing Benghazi-related records to the watchdog group by September 30.
The first disk, labeled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as containing non-classified emails not previously disclosed by Clinton, contains about 14,900 documents, Olson said.
The State Department previously agreed voluntarily to hand over emails to or from Clinton in her official capacity as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.
As part of proceedings in a separate Judicial Watch lawsuit, a federal judge on Friday ordered Clinton to answer written questions from the group about why she chose to rely on a private server located in the basement of her NY home, rather than use a government email account. “Included among the Abedin-Band emails is an exchange revealing that when Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain requested a meeting with Secretary of State Clinton, he was forced to go through the Clinton Foundation for an appointment”.
“State has not yet had the opportunity to complete a review of the documents to determine whether they are agency records or if they are duplicative of documents State has already produced through the Freedom of Information Act, ” spokesman Mark Toner said.
One can nearly hear the regret in the copy editor’s voice as he mounted the headline, as if Clinton’s email security imbroglio was merely a hurdle for her campaign to clear, not a self-inflicted national security scandal about which she has consistently lied to the public.
The State Department is now reviewing almost 15,000 previously undisclosed emails recovered as part of the FBI investigation.
Clinton, who is now leading Trump in opinion polls ahead of the election, has said she did not compromise classified information and used a private server for convenience, and later apologized, saying “I take responsibility”. Republicans charge that donors to the foundation, including foreign governments and corporations, got preferential treatment from the State Department while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.
“Her people have been trying to pin it on me”.
The FBI last week turned over a number of documents to the U.S. Congress related to its probe into the emails, but this has riled both Democrats and Republicans.
Representatives for Powell, in a separate statement to NBC News, said he had no recollection of the conversation with Clinton but did write to her.
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Powell and aides to his successor as secretary of state in the Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice, received some classified information via personal email accounts, Reuters has reported.
