Noah Rothman:
You have to hand it to the Department of Justice. Amid a confirmation fight in the Senate over the president’s nominee to replace outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the DOJ sure knows how to grease the wheels of government.
On Friday, Rep. Try Gowdy (R-SC), chairman of the Benghazi select committee, issued a subpoena requiring that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a variety of her aides (and, possibly, “aides to aides”) provide congressional investigators with access to her emails.
“We sent a subpoena to the State Department for emails from a number of individuals within the State Department, other than Secretary Clinton,” Gowdy told Reuters reporters.
Gowdy’s committee is not the only organization seeking access to Clinton’s emails. Larry Klayman, founder of the government watchdog organization Freedom Watch, recently filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking access to Clinton’s electronic communications.
On Friday, the DOJ issued a statement in response to this request that accused the conservative organization of engaging in baseless speculation.
Plaintiff provides no basis, beyond sheer speculation, to believe that former Secretary Clinton withheld any work-related emails from those provided to the Department of State,” the agency says.
The filing, first reported by Politico, is the first time that the Justice Department has addressed the government’s role in accounting for Clinton’s private emails.
The agency says that the Freedom of Information Act “creates no obligation for an agency to search for and produce records that it does not possess and control.”
Justice also criticized Klayman’s motion to hold Clinton and her former State Department aide Cheryl Mills in contempt.
The Justice Department made no inaccurate statements in its response, but they don’t do much for Clinton’s case either.
Yes, conservative investigators are merely speculating when they contend that Clinton might have withheld emails related to her role as America’s chief diplomat when she surrendered 55,000 physical pages of printed out emails to the State Department. What else do they have to go on but speculation? Freedom Watch’s skepticism is not based in paranoia but in a logical mistrust of Clinton’s extraordinary and unprecedented efforts to preserve her own “convenience” by refusing to use an achievable email system.
holder is a democratic racist protecting his outgoing ass for a big private job. Ever wonder where all that money went for recovery of Haiti under the sexual, pedophile billy?
holder is on his knees and so is the doj giving hummers to the fool every day-one of the dirtiest agencies in the gov out side dos, cia, fbi, hls, senate and house.
you need to look in China and Hong Kong where billy and the lesbian wife have hidden billions.
Read the book Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master plan to destroy America by Laing and Xiangsui. The book takes about various American companies that laundered money from China into billy’s off shore account for cyber, satellite and operations in the pentagon.
the pedophile should have been tried for treason
Remember when Pat Tillman was KIA in Afghanistan? The Army claimed he was killed by the Taliban, but after a lengthy investigation, it was revealed he was killed by friendly fire. I hate for the Army to get caught lying, but without people asking questions, demanding investigations and facts uncovering what actually happened to a brave and selfless American would not have been uncovered. Sometimes it is necessary to find out if people we inherently trust are being honest. Sometimes the results are painful.
Hillary has done nothing at all to benefit anyone but herself and has built no reputation of honesty or integrity, making doubt and suspicion totally justified. So, when a United States consulate is sacked and an ambassador murdered, questions are raised. When the answer to those questions is “a video did it”, more questions are raised.
Remember Watergate. The questions and investigations were relentless. And, as it turned out, for good reason. I don’t recall a lot of Republican wagon-circling, but I am sure there was some; possibly much. However, in the end, Republicans sought the facts while Democrats smelled blood in the water and relentlessly clamored for “justice”.
Hillary had a secret (until revealed by the hacker, “Juccifer”) server on which she kept all State Department emails, invisible to scrutiny but by those SHE allows to view them. Then, after showing us all how honest and reputable she is, she selected 31,000 emails which SHE says was none of our business (“trust me”) and deleted them. Move along, nothing to see here.
So, wanting to “trust but verify” is unreasonable? Really?
As far as I know, there doesn’t have to be a ‘proven’ or justified reason for the request. We used to get equivalent requests at the county government level and whether they were ‘fishing’ or not, we provided any related records.
What I think is instructive is that they aren’t saying there aren’t any records which meet the criteria, but that they don’t have an ‘obligation’ to search for them (actually, I think a FOIA request means they *DO* have an obligation).
If there were no records, their response would be ‘There are no records which meet your request’.