Massive news on your Monday as a federal judge has ordered Hillary Clinton to testify under oath in a deposition about her email servers and scandal of deleted emails.
U.S. District Court Royce Lamberth issued the order Monday in connection with a five-and-a-half-year-old Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the conservative group Judicial Watch filed seeking emails related to the deadly 2012 attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.
The former secretary of state’s sworn written answers were “incomplete, unhelpful, or cursory,” Lamberth says.
“To argue that the Court now has enough information to determine whether State conducted an adequate search is preposterous,” wrote Lamberth, who has tangled with Clinton aides for decades in a series of cases.
The judge continued…
“Even years after the FBI investigation, the slow trickle of new emails has yet to be explained,” Lamberth wrote. He blasted Clinton’s prior answers given in response to another judge’s order as “incomplete, unhelpful, or cursory, at best.”
Among the questions Lamberth said Clinton still needs to answer: “How did she arrive at her belief that her private server emails would be preserved by normal State Department processes for email retention? Who told her that—if anyone—and when? Did she realize State was giving ‘no records’ response to FOIA requests for her emails? If so, did she suspect that she had any obligation to disclose the existence of her private server to those at State handling the FOIA requests? … And why did she think that using a private server to conduct State Department business was permissible under the law in the first place?”
In addition to ordering Clinton’s deposition, Lamberth said he’ll require Clinton’s former chief of staff Cheryl Mills to be deposed, although she was already questioned, in-person and under-oath by Judicial Watch about the issue in another FOIA case. The judge also approved a subpoena to Google for any Clinton emails it may possess.
You can read more from our friends over at Politico.com
