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| December 2, 2016: This Week's
Headlines
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JW Asks Court to Find Government Misconduct in
Clinton Email
Scandal
The Clinton email scandal is more than about the conduct of
Hillary Clinton. It is about the lawlessness of the Obama administration,
especially the State Department.
That’s why our Judicial Watch attorneys recently asked a
federal court, on the grounds that the documents relate to government
misconduct, to reject the State Department’s secrecy claims over certain Clinton
email-related documents.
We argue that the agency should release 30 emails currently
being withheld under various “deliberative process,” “attorney client,” and
“attorney work product” privileges.
Our lawsuit was originally
filed in May 2015. It seeks “all emails sent or received by former Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton in her official capacity as secretary of State, as
well as all emails by other State Department employees to Secretary Clinton
regarding her non-‘state.gov’ email address” (Judicial Watch, Inc. v.
U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00687)).
We make the sensible argument that
Clinton’s email practices at the State Department constitute
misconduct:
The U.S. federal government has produced two State Department
Inspector General reports and a report following an FBI investigation, which
collectively support the conclusion that, at a minimum, the unofficial server
arrangement was misconduct even if it was not a prosecutable violation
of criminal law or one that will necessarily result in civil liability.
Secretary Clinton herself has called the unofficial server arrangement a
‘mistake’…
The State Department’s descriptions of the documents show that
it may have misled the public about the Clinton email scandal:
The Vaughn [withholding index] description of these
records appears to show, at least in part, a public relations campaign
orchestrated by [the Obama State Department] to create a false equivalence
between Secretary Clinton’s unofficial server and the records management
practices of former Secretaries Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Madeline
Albright. No one believes that Madeline Albright used an unofficial server
located at her residence for government communications. Nor did Colin Powell
hold 30,000 government records in his possession for two years after he left the
State Department. Accordingly, it would appear that one purpose of the withheld
discussions in this case was to manage the public messaging about government
misconduct so as to mislead the public about its
severity.
We asked the court to reject the State Department’s efforts to
shield documents under the “deliberative process privilege,” among other
asserted privileges, in order to protect the confidentiality of internal
deliberations:
In this Circuit, the government misconduct exception to the
deliberative process privilege applies in two circumstances. First, the
“deliberative process privilege disappears altogether when there is any reason
to believe government misconduct occurred.” And second, “where there is reason
to believe the documents sought may shed light on government misconduct, the
privilege is routinely denied on the grounds that shielding internal government
deliberations in this context does not serve the public’s interest in honest,
effective government.” … Both exceptions apply to the 30 documents in question
here, for the reasons already elaborated.
The State Department has been producing Clinton emails
recovered by the FBI under a September 23, 2016, court order issued by
U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg. The State Department confirmed in
September that the FBI turned over to it at least 15,000 new Clinton emails as a
result of Judicial Watch’s litigation seeking
all of Clinton’s work-related emails.
Hillary Clinton has repeatedly stated that she believes that
the 55,000 pages of documents she returned to the State Department in December
2014 included all of her work-related emails. In response to a court order in
other Judicial Watch litigation, she declared under penalty of
perjury that she had “directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my
custody that were or are potentially federal records be provided to the
Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done.” The
emails found by the FBI are also at odds with her official campaign
statement suggesting all “work or potentially work-related emails” were
provided to the State Department. The full history of this case can be found here.
The Obama State Department is abusing the Freedom of
Information law in order to keep the American people in the dark about its
cover-up of the Clinton email scandal. The courts should hold the Obama agency
accountable for this lawlessness.
Trump Administration Should Investigate Clinton
Scandals
President Obama’s legacy is one of eight years of incredible
scandal and abuse of power. I pray the new administration will conduct itself
within the laws and begin the restoration of the rule of law in
Washington.
The temptation for the new president will be to move on and
leave the Clinton gang alone, and that would be a mistake. Here’s what I wrote
on the topic earlier this week in USA Today.
President-elect Donald Trump seems to be harboring misgivings
about the investigation and possible prosecution of Hillary Clinton for her
email, national security and Clinton Foundation pay-for-play scandals. The
president-elect has said that he “does not want to hurt the Clintons,” and that
is very gracious. But Clinton’s transgressions were not committed against him
personally; they were committed against the nation at large. And it is to the
American people that she must be held accountable.
Clinton did not commit these acts of malfeasance as a private
citizen. And kindly concerns about her personal well being should not be allowed
to halt, or even hamstring, a thorough investigation of her flagrant wrongdoing.
More than a century ago, President Grover Cleveland declared, “A public office
is a public trust.” And there is now every reason to believe that Clinton used
the former to violate the latter.
For more than two years, Secretary Clinton avoided any serious
criminal investigation of her various misdeeds. President Obama, and officials
in his administration, defended and excused her misconduct. Few Americans trust
the current FBI or Justice Department leadership to investigate or prosecute
Clinton. In fact, reports detail that the
Justice Department is suppressing the FBI’s attempts to seriously investigate
the Clinton Foundation.
That is why Trump must commit his administration to a serious,
independent investigation of the very serious Clinton national security, email
and pay-to-play scandals. If Trump’s appointees continue the Obama
administration’s politicized spiking of a criminal investigation of Clinton, it
would be a betrayal of his promise to the American people to “drain the swamp”
of out-of-control corruption in Washington, D.C.
President-elect Trump should focus on healing the broken
justice system, affirm the rule of law and allow his attorney general, either
directly or through a special prosecutor, to investigate the Clinton
scandals.
No one is above the law, and no citizen should get a “get out
jail free” card just because she is a powerful
politician.
As you well know – and thanks to your support – we at Judicial
Watch won’t rely on the politicians to do the hard work of ferreting out
corruption in government. Though we’d welcome an agressive new approach by the
Trump administration, we will vigorously pursue accountability through our
independent investigations and lawsuits.
New Documents Show Clinton Conflicts of
Interest
Further confirming the need to “clean house” on the Clinton
corruption scandals, we just uncovered 508 pages of new
documents thanks to our historic Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit
seeking information about possible conflicts of interest involving the Hillary
Clinton State Department and Bill Clinton’s various activities.
More than 440 pages of the documents were redacted either in
full, or with only minor notations remaining. The documents were released as a
result of a federal court order in a
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against
the State Department on May 28, 2013 (Judicial Watch v. U.S.
Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-00772)).
The documents included an undated, unsigned memo entitled
“Private Sector Opportunities for WJC” [William Jefferson Clinton]. The memo
provided capabilities analysis of three companies with major investment
interests in Haiti: Tetra Pak, Seaboard, and Cemex.
The documents also include a lengthy March 2009 email from
Clinton Foundation Director of Foreign Policy Amitabh Desai to
former Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Shapiro and subsequently forwarded to
top Clinton aide Jake Sullivan containing the names of nearly 200 then-current
and former heads of state to be invited to the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative
annual meeting. The list includes
dignitaries from Saudi Arabia, which gave $14.5 million to the Clinton
Foundation; Kuwait, which gave between $5 and $10 million; Oman, the United Arab
Emirates, and Qatar – all of which donated between $1 and $5 million over the
years. In February 2015, the Washington
Post reported, “A third of foundation donors who have given more than
$1 million are foreign governments or other entities … and foreign donors make
up more than half of those who have given more than $5 million.”
In July 2014, Judicial Watch released more than
200 conflict-of-interest reviews by State Department ethics advisers of
proposed Bill Clinton speaking and consulting engagements during Hillary
Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. The documents show that Mr. Clinton’s
office proposed 215 speeches around the globe. And 215 times, the State
Department stated that it had “no objection.” The Washington
Examiner published a report by
Judicial Watch Chief Investigative Reporter Micah Morrison and Examiner
Senior Watchdog Reporter Luke Rosiak which notes that Mr. Clinton “earned $48
million while his wife presided over U.S. foreign policy, raising questions
about whether the Clintons fulfilled ethics agreements related to the Clinton
Foundation during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State.”
It is a scandal that the Obama administration stalled the
release of these smoking gun documents for over five years. These documents show
that Hillary and Bill Clinton’s machine sought to shake down almost every
country in the world, from Saudi Arabia to desperately poor Haiti.
Again, all the more reason for President-elect Trump to launch
a serious criminal investigation of the Clinton cash machine.
Tune In! -- The First 100 Days: The Anti-Corruption
Agenda
I am pleased to announce that we will convene a special
educational panel on Tuesday, December 6, from 11 a.m. until 12 noon to discuss
“The First 100 Days – The Anti-Corruption Agenda.” The panel will be streamed
live on the Judicial Watch website and on our Facebook
page, which you can find here.
We’ll get into specifics on what a new Trump administration and
Congress should do to roll back corruption and ushering in a new era of
transparency. We’ll cover the Freedom of Information Act reform, election
fraud, pay-to-play politics, IRS targeting, immigration and border enforcement,
executive order overreach, and more.
Our panelists are about as good as one can get here in DC.
They include Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH), who is a hard-charging member of
both the Judiciary Committee and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee;
Edwin Meese III, former U.S. attorney general and Ronald Reagan distinguished
fellow emeritus at The Heritage Foundation; Mark Krikorian, executive for the
Center for Immigration Studies; Andrew C. McCarthy, senior fellow for the
National Review Institute and former chief assistant U.S. attorney for the
Southern District of New York; and Ramona Cotca, senior attorney at Judicial
Watch.
Again, I hope you can join us live at 11 am (Eastern) on
Tuesday, December 6. The panel will be available live on our web page and our Facebook page. In the meantime,
you can whet your appetite with some great video clips from my colleagues and me on
the challenges ahead for the rule of law as we begin a new
presidency.
Until next week...
 Tom FittonPresident
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