Hillary Clinton asked an appeals court on Friday to overturn a judge’s order that she appear for a sworn deposition about her handling of classified emails and the 2012 Benghazi attack as secretary of state.
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A federal judge Monday granted a request from conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch to have Clinton sit for a sworn deposition to answer questions about her use of a private email server to conduct government business.
The Clinton legal team responded to Lamberth’s ruling by filing an 83-page petition with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where they asked the court to undo the order, which they suggested was out of line.
According to Clinton’s team, a reversal of the lower court’s ruling “is warranted because Judicial Watch’s impending depositions of Secretary Clinton and Ms. Mills are inappropriate, unnecessary, and a clear abuse of discretion.”
The lawyers said Lamberth has overstepped given Clinton’s Cabinet-level position at the time of the alleged abuses.
“The district court’s order violates the well-established principle that high-ranking government officials should not be subjected to depositions absent extraordinary circumstances,” they said in the petition.
Her lawyers argued that a 2018 D.C. circuit court ruling in Judicial Watch v. Pompeo should make this case “moot” and that Lamberth’s court “lacked jurisdiction to order additional discovery because the FOIA requests were submitted only after Secretary Clinton left office.”
Clinton’s team also argued that she’s pretty much too important and had other things going on that may conflict with her testifying, which is just as pathetic of an excuse as it sounds.
Lamberth said there were still more questions that needed to be answered.
“As extensive as the existing record is, it does not sufficiently explain Secretary Clinton’s state of mind when she decided it would be an acceptable practice to set up and use a private server to conduct State Department business,” Lamberth said.
The judge went on to recognize that while Clinton responded to written questions in a separate case, “those responses were either incomplete, unhelpful, or cursory at best. Simply put her responses left many more questions than answers.” Lamberth said that using written questions this time “will only muddle any understanding of Secretary Clinton’s state of mind and fail to capture the full picture, this delaying the final disposition of this case even further.”
The ruling comes after Judicial Watch revealed at a December 2019 status conference that the FBI released “approximately thirty previously undisclosed Clinton emails,” and that the State Department “failed to fully explain” where they came from.
The State Department has been pushing for the discovery phase of the case to come to a close, but Lamberth said he is not ready to do so, saying that “there is still more to learn.”
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It certainly seems like Clinton may finally be held accountable — to some extent — for her private email scandal and horrific actions (or lack thereof) in Benghazi.
And based on her legal teams reponse to the jud
