Judge orders Justice and State departments to reopen part of Hillary Clinton email inquiry
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/judge-orders-justice-state-departments-to-reopen-narrow-inquiry-into-handling-of-clinton-email-records-lawsuit/2018/12/06/71d03530-f9a1-11e8-863c-9e2f864d47e7_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9cde2f4340a2
A U.S. judge ordered the Justice and State departments Thursday to reopen an inquiry into whether Hillary Clinton used a private email server while secretary of state to deliberately evade public records laws, and to answer whether the agencies acted in bad faith by not telling a court for months that they had asked in mid-2014 for missing emails to be returned.
The order risks reopening partisan wounds that have barely healed since Clinton's unsuccessful 2016 presidential bid, but in issuing the order Thursday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act required it.
In a narrow but sharply worded 10-page opinion, Lamberth wrote that despite the government's claimed presumption of transparency, "faced with one of the gravest modern offenses to government openness, [the Obama administration's] State and Justice departments fell far short" of the law's requirements in a lawsuit for documents.
Lamberth added that despite President Donald Trump's repeated campaign attacks against Clinton for not making her emails public, "the current Justice Department made things worse," by taking the position that agencies are not obliged to search for records not in the government's possession when a FOIA request is made.