CP roundup for Monday..
https://www.justice.gov/psc/press-room
In another of many stories from the 2016 presidential campaign that will not die, a district judge last week handed a victory to the conservative legal transparency group Judicial Watch by requiring two major federal agencies to perform a do-over on their search for missing Hillary Clinton emails.
In a Dec. 6 ruling, Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the Justice and State departments to meet with the plaintiffs’ attorneys to discuss next steps in determining whether Obama administration first-term Secretary of State Clinton’s use of a private email server was an “intentional attempt to evade” the Freedom of Information Act. They will also review whether State’s attempts to settle the Judicial Watch document-request case in 2014-2015 regarding the deaths of four Americans at the hands of terrorists in Benghazi, Libya, “amounted to bad faith,” and whether State had adequately searched its files for the legal group’s requested documents.
Lamberth, an appointee of President Reagan, used tough language in requiring that the two departments respond within 10 days on requests that go back to the Obama administration, saying the agencies’ approach “smacks of outrageous misconduct” as well as “negligence borne of incompetence.” The judge suggested the possibility that “career employees in the State and Justice departments colluded to scuttle public scrutiny of Clinton, skirt FOIA and hoodwink this court.”
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sauce https://www.govexec.com/oversight/2018/12/judge-slams-justice-and-state-departments-inept-handling-foia-requests/153413/?oref=channelriver