Lawyers for the State and Justice Departments agreed with Judicial Watch that Hillary Clinton should testify about her emails and the Benghazi incident.
Clinton Appeal Must Be Rejected, Says State and Justice Department
Judicial Watch first launched a lawsuit in 2014 that was designed to seek records concerning “talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack,” as false statements by Susan Rice regarding the incident were created by the White House at the time. It was this discovery on Benghazi that led to the start of the scandal on Hillary Clinton’s emails.
In March this year, District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that Judicial Watch would be allowed to depose Clinton in the Benghazi lawsuit, but Clinton and her former Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills filed an emergency appeal against the decision, known as a “Petition for Writ of Mandamus.”
Judicial Watch argued in their lawsuit that the appeal must not be granted for a number of reasons:
In our response, we argue that Clinton and Mills “must demonstrate that they have no other adequate means of relief,” which they failed to show… In fact, “the District Court reasonably concluded that Clinton’s previous explanations for using a personal email server are cursory, incomplete, and seemingly at odds with what discovery has yielded to date… We argue further that Clinton and Mills are trying to avoid their deposition testimony by relying on “their status as former high-level government officials.” Clinton and Mills, “do not offer a single case from this Court or any other, holding that former high-level government officials should not be required to follow regular appellate channels to challenge a discovery order”…
We also argue against Clinton’s claim that she held the server under “claim of right,” when it contained thousands of federal records. Judicial Watch states that unlike other secretaries of state, like Henry Kissinger, Clinton did not obtain an opinion from State’s legal adviser on whether she could take the federal records prior to her departure from State. Clinton’s “claim of right” argument over her server would be like a bank robbery.
Will We Finally Get The Truth?
Surprisingly, the Justice and State Department, who originally fought against the lawsuit, agreed with Judicial Watch’s arguments.
“The government did not seek and thus does not support the extraordinary relief of mandamus due to the unique circumstances of this case,” lawyers wrote, arguing against the appeal. “This is the rare situation in which discovery of a former Cabinet Secretary was not authorized for the impermissible purpose of probing internal government decision-making regarding official policy, but rather to focus on the impact on FOIA compliance of a former official’s unusual decision to use a private email server to systematically conduct large volumes of official business.”
RELATED: Donald Trump Jr. Obliterates Joy Reid For Calling Iraq Embassy Attack ‘Trump’s Benghazi’
It seems we are yet another step closer to putting Crooked Hillary behind bars, but don’t expect this small victory to be the end of it – this is likely to be a long and hard-fought battle.