Judge: Clinton aides can be questioned about email server

A federal judge on Tuesday declared that top aides to former Secretary of State Hillary ClintonHillary Rodham ClintonJudge opens door to new stage for Clinton email case Sanders shuts down supporters who boo Clinton Sanders praises Gitmo plan, sneaks in shot at Clinton MORE should be questioned about their role in Clinton’s “homebrew” email setup, and the potential that federal open records laws were skirted. Clinton has given only about half of the roughly 60,000 emails from her time in office to the State Department for recordkeeping. We discussed that finding here.

The ruling by US District Judge Emmet Sullivan is likely to add to the uncertainty hovering over Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for the November US presidential election, about the legal consequences of her decision to exclusively use a private email server in her NY home for her government work. The court-ordered discovery will help determine why the State Department and Mrs. Clinton, even despite receiving numerous FOIA requests, kept the record system secret for years. He also said it may eventually be necessary for Clinton to testify.

“Well, Jake, we all know that the right-wing sees Hillary Clinton as the Democrats’ best chance to hold on to the White House and continue to build on the progress that President Obama has made”.

“It just boggles the mind a little that the State Department allowed this practice to occur in the first place”, said Sullivan.

Judicial Watch’s complaint that Clinton and Abedin “self-selected” their work emails “ignores the fact that federal employees routinely manage their email and “self-select” their work-related messages when they, quite permissibly, designate and delete personal emails from their government email accounts”, they wrote. The State Department has released them to the public in monthly batches since mid-2015.

Sullivan issued his ruling from the bench Tuesday, where he said questions about how the State Department handled Clinton’s email server have created “at least a “reasonable suspicion” that open-records laws were violated, according to a report in the Washington Post. For her part, Clinton has said nothing was marked classified at the time she sent or received it. Her campaign press secretary Brian Fallon has dismissed the issue as a fight between the intelligence community and the State Department over what constitutes a secret – a phenomenon that he calls “overclassification run amok”.