A federal judge ordered Hillary Clinton and two of her top aides not to delete any potentially work-related emails after Clinton's former chief of staff vowed to discard all electronic copies of her records by Monday.Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court also demanded Clinton, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin provide assurances by Wednesday that they would not delete any federal records in their possession.
The order came Friday evening in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch seeking documentation of a controversial employment status bestowed on Abedin, Clinton's deputy chief of staff, that allowed her to work simultaneously for the State Department, the Clinton Foundation and a consulting firm called Teneo Strategies.
After Sullivan asked Clinton, Mills and Abedin to certify under penalty of perjury that they had each submitted all work-related emails, only Clinton reportedly responded.
Mills and Abedin seemingly ignored requests that they had handed over all their emails as each continued to prepare emails for the State Department.
"The destruction of federal documents in the face of a court order is par for the course for a Clinton-related scandal," said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. "If not for the swift action of Judicial Watch's legal team and an alert federal judge, there is no telling what important public information would have been lost forever."
The conservative watchdog group filed an "urgent response" Friday evening after learning of Mills' plans, laid out in a letter from her attorney to the State Department, to delete all remaining electronic copies of her work-related emails.
Mills, Clinton's former chief of staff, was asked by the State Department Thursday to submit all copies of records related to her government service in the wake of growing inquiries about her boss' unusual email arrangement. She plans to hand over another batch of documents Monday.
"Following our production on Aug. 10, 2015, we have instructed her to delete any and all electronic copies in her possession," Mills' attorney wrote in a letter to the State Department Thursday.
Her attorney also told the agency that Mills never had an email account on Clinton's private server, contrary to numerous reports that asserted Mills hosted her communications on the same "clintonemail.com" domain that Clinton used for her own emails.