Associated Press files FOIA suit against State Department over Hillary Clinton emails and documents
The U.S. Department of State has “failed to respond substantively” to five of six Freedom of Information Act requests made as long ago as 2010 concerning Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Associated Press contends. So the news agency on Wednesday filed a federal FOIA suit in Washington, D.C., seeking to force the feds to comply with legal requirements concerning the provision of government documents.
Among the documents being sought by the AP are Clinton’s scheduling documents during the four years she was secretary of state, and documents related to the raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed, reports Courthouse News.
Also at issue is Clinton’s practice, confirmed earlier this month, of using a private email account rather than an official State Department account, for a large number of communications.
“State’s failure to ensure that Secretary Clinton’s governmental emails were retained and preserved by the agency, and its failure timely to seek out and search those emails in response to AP’s requests, indicate at the very least that State has not engaged in the diligent, good-faith search that FOIA requires,” says the AP complaint.
The Courthouse News article doesn’t include any comment from Clinton and says the State Department did not respond to a comment request. However, Clinton said Tuesday that she turned over to the State Department the work-related emails in her private account, which represented about half of the emails in it, reports the Associated Press. She said she deleted many others, which were personal.
USA Today reported that Clinton said she sent or received 62,320 emails during her years in charge of the State Department, turned over 30,490 last fall to the State Department and deleted 31,830 she considered personal. Over 27,500 went to official government e-mail addresses.
“Looking back, it would have been better for me to use two separate phones and two separate e-mail accounts,” Clinton said Tuesday. She explained that she thought it would be “simpler” just to use one electronic device, but “obviously, it hasn’t worked out that way.”
On Wednesday, a spokesman for the White House spokesman said “it is not necessary for new FOIA requests to be filed or old FOIA requests to be reconsidered in order to get access to those records,” since Clinton has turned them over to the State Department, the AP reports.
