One federal judge has now ordered former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and her top aides to preserve all of records from their time in the administration, while another judge is trying to get to the bottom of how the government is deciding what classified information was included in those messages.A flurry of court filings over the last week have only heightened the political perils to Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, and the practical problems President Obama’s team faces as it tries to grapple with the mess Mrs. Clinton’s unique email arrangement left behind.
Responding to a judge’s order, the State Department instructed Mrs. Clinton and aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills to save all “federal documents, electronic or otherwise, in her possession or control,” and to assure the government that none of them will be deleted.
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Lawyers for both Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills responded with assurances, but David E. Kendall, Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer, had not responded to the State Department by a Wednesday deadline.
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“Further, in light of the State Department’s August 12, 2015 status report, the August 14, 2015 report shall indicate the extent to which the State Department is working with other government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice, to search Mrs. Clinton’s private email server for information relevant to this lawsuit,” the judge said in an order Thursday afternoon.
The communications came as part of open-records cases filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm that has been trying to get a peek at Mrs. Clintons’s communications for years, but was unknowingly foiled by her email situation, in which she
Prodded by the Benghazi review panel, the State Department belatedly admitted Mrs. Clinton had
Nearly two years after she left office, Mrs. Clinton returned the records to the department,
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Those 55,000 pages, comprising about 30,000 emails, were the ones Mrs. Clinton deemed to be government business and returned to the department. She said there were about 32,000 other messages that were entirely personal, which she didn’t turn over. She said she has since
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said they are asking the courts to insist that the State Department play a more active role in seeing whether Mrs. Clinton made the right calls in deciding which records she deemed government business and which she deemed private.
“It’s not clear they’ve turned over all of Mrs. Clinton’s records,” he said.