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Judge rejects State Dept request to delay hearing on Hillary emails and server

Judge rejects State Dept request to delay hearing on Hillary emails and server

Judicial Watch seeks discovery, potentially including Hillary’s sworn testimony.

Yesterday, the Judge in the Judicial Watch FOIA case involving Huma Abedin’s outside employment ordered an expedited hearing on Judicial Watch’s request to take discovery as to, among other things, Hillary’s electronic devices and server.

While Judicial Watch did not specify the discovery it wanted, that logically could include the sworn deposition testimony of Hillary as to her electronic devices and server, as well as that of her attorney David Kendall, who maintained custody of electronic records.

On Judicial Watchs request, the Judge moved the hearing up from September 10 to August 20. The State Department then filed a motion Motion for Extension of Time seeking to delay the hearing until August 27, because two of its key people were on vacation.

As grounds for this request, defendant states that the two DOJ supervisors who are responsible for this case and related FOIA cases are currently on vacation, and that the additional time is required for defendant to respond to the August 17 Order.

(Full embed at bottom of post)

The Judge quickly rejected the request to delay the hearing, even before Judicial Watch had a chance to file a written opposition:

MINUTE ORDER denying [28] Defendant’s Opposed Motion for an Extension of Time. However, due to the Court’s calendar, the status hearing will take place at 1:00 p.m. on August 20, 2015 in Courtroom 24A, rather than 12:00 p.m. as originally scheduled. Signed by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on August 18, 2015. (lcegs4) Modified on 8/18/2015 (ztcr).

UPDATE: Via Byron York, Hillary in a speech today in Nevada says she was the one to make the decision as to what was and was not work related. So she just made herself the key person to testify on the subject:

https://twitter.com/Bridget_PJM/status/633759714334085120

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Judicial Watch FOIA Case Huma Abedin – Defendant's Motion for Extension of Time and Hearing Delay

[Note Judicial Watch had represented Legal Insurrection in FOIA matters including as to David Gregory and the Virginia State Bar, and also is an advertiser.]

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Comments

Yah…that judge is pissed o-f-t. He’s not having any.

    Estragon in reply to Ragspierre. | August 18, 2015 at 5:38 pm

    Yeah, he’s showing the tell-tale signs of a judge who is fed up with BS and is going to crack the whip* on the offender.

    – –

    * Oops, forgot to issue trigger warning, my bad!

That was definitely not the kind of request for extension of time that one would expect to see granted.

ugottabekiddinme | August 18, 2015 at 5:21 pm

Having litigated in federal court, one of the least likely excuses to win a delay is someone being on vacation.

Platte River Network the group in Colorado that maintained Hillary’s server despite not having security clearance to do so, is under FBI investigation for stealing high-level phone numbers and providing Congress circumvention tools to politicians.

But there is more —Hillary’s (and Obama’s) real email scandal:

“The real scandal that scares Clinton, and terrifies Obama, is what those emails say. It’s more than likely that they tell the truth about the invasion of Libya, the Arab Spring, Benghazi, and Obama’s/Hillary’s relationship with the terrorists. The specter of an alliance with the mother ship of all Islamic terror, the Muslim Brotherhood, has stalked Obama since his friendship with Rashid Khalidi was revealed prior to the 2008 election.”

“We know that PSD-11 was Obama’s directive to codify the United States’ alliance with terrorists. This was the order to the U.S. government to work with the Muslim Brotherhood – the same group that birthed Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Taliban, etc.

By appointing Hillary, and her special assistant Huma Abedin, Obama effectively handed over the State Department to the Muslim Brotherhood. They used the U.S. Department of State to overthrow allied governments.” http://theamericanreport.org/2015/08/17/hillarys-and-obamas-real-email-scandals/

    Yet even what Hillary likes to have for breakfast is likely classified information. It’s not even just what she had. What aides of hers had on an insecure system is probably a lot worse, pound for pound. All under her wise leadership though (cough).

    Sammy Finkelman in reply to Uncle Samuel. | August 18, 2015 at 6:12 pm

    Hillary’s (and Obama’s) real email scandal:

    “The real scandal that scares Clinton, and terrifies Obama, is what those emails say.

    The deleted e-mails, you mean.

    While I don’t think the secrets that would be revealed, or thw leads that you would get, by having all the e-mails are exactly what this article says, I think that is the real big thing, not the fact that some e-mails might be considered classified..

      Sammy Finkelman in reply to Sammy Finkelman. | August 18, 2015 at 6:13 pm

      Another thing:

      The alliance with terrorists, by the way, goes back to before September 11th, 2001.

      But it would not be accurate to describe Sept 11th as an inside job, even if corrupt people didn’t do things or actively frustrated an investigation.

      InEssence in reply to Sammy Finkelman. | August 18, 2015 at 9:28 pm

      The server was hacked, so the E-mails are for sale. A number of companies will fetch copies of them for you for a price.

        Phillep Harding in reply to InEssence. | August 20, 2015 at 12:54 pm

        “Chain of custody”. Bad for a legal court, not an issue for the court of public opinion.

        Hmmmm. Oh, well. The docs that would harm Hillary the most also have highest classifications.

MaggotAtBroadAndWall | August 18, 2015 at 5:47 pm

Judicial Watch is doing God’s work.

Sammy Finkelman | August 18, 2015 at 6:02 pm

It looks like there are still people protecting Bill and Hillary Clinton in office, but it’s not unanimous.

Bill Clinton, I think, even had friends in the Reagan Administration.

    Ragspierre in reply to Sammy Finkelman. | August 18, 2015 at 6:12 pm

    Sammy! Nap time, hon.

      Sammy Finkelman in reply to Ragspierre. | August 18, 2015 at 6:38 pm

      No, it’s all true. The U.S Attorney was a Democratic Arkansas politician.

        Ragspierre in reply to Sammy Finkelman. | August 18, 2015 at 6:46 pm

        I bet you couldn’t find a Republican in Arkansas in those days with a pack of hounds.

        Hell, Rick Perry was once a Democrat.

          Sammy Finkelman in reply to Ragspierre. | August 18, 2015 at 6:52 pm

          Bill Clinton lost his race for re-election in 1980 to a Republican.

          He was offered the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, but wanted to continue his political career.

        Sammy Finkelman in reply to Sammy Finkelman. | August 18, 2015 at 6:51 pm

        And somebody had to arrange or agree to Reagan keeping him on and re-appointing him.

        George Procter was kept on both by Reagan and Bush and into the Clinton Administration, where he became the head of the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs.

        Bill Clinton’s connections inside the Reagan Administration, of course, came through knowing who was corrupt, and so on.

        I mean Bill Clinton’s political godfather had been the Founder of organized crime in America, “retired” gangster Owney “the Killer” Madden (1892-1965) and political boss of Hot Springs Arkansas. A kind of Lex Luthor character, you might say. Bill Clinton’s step-uncle, Raymond Clinton, was an important member of the machine.

Is this Judge Emmet Sullivan, the Bill Clinton nominee?

Also, NBC is reporting just now that the FBI is confident they can recover material from her server. Who is leaking this? Wondering if Obama has Ok’d the leaks.

    Sammy Finkelman in reply to Mercyneal. | August 18, 2015 at 7:10 pm

    For purposes of corruption, or fixing cases, Bill Clinton was interested in prosecutors, not judges.

    U.S. Attorney George Proctor took care of his brother, Roger.

    Bill Clinton’s half-brother, Roger Clinton, was employed by Dan Lasater in his cocaine importation business. (Dan Lasater was a big campaign contributor to Bill Clinton and probably crucial for his 1982 comeback, except we don’t have proof because he Republican Party did not save the 1982 campaign finance reports and the State of Arkansas had destroyed them by 1992. We do know he contributed in 1984.)

    Dan Lasater was probably the one probably smuggling cocaine into Mena Airport (and further into Detroit) Bill Clinton spoke about the smuggling into Detroit in the 1988
    Democratic National convention. (He didn’t mention anything about how the cocaine got into Arkansas! It wasn’t grown there, and no place in Arkansas is a port.)

    It wasn’t the CIA, of course, which was smuggling the cocaine. Not even the timeline is right for the idea CIA running cocaine to support the contras. The funding was only cut off in 1984 and the cocaine smuggling operation into Mena Airport was over by then.

    But Bill Clinton supported the story. While president, Bill Clinton once took a question from Sarah McClendon
    that was premised on the CIA explanation and didn’t dispute it.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPsdNMI-130

    Anyway, somehow Roger Clinton became a co-operating witness, not against the leader but against a minor participant, Sam Anderson, and received a short sentence.

    President Clinton pardoned his brother on his last day in office. And Roger Clinton was involved with the mob as late as 1999:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/us/roger-clinton-s-dogged-effort-for-drug-trafficker.html

    In late September 1999, two agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation walked up the driveway of Mr. Clinton’s home in Redondo Beach, Calif., to ask him about his relationship with Rosario Gambino, who prosecutors have repeatedly said is an associate of the Gambino crime family and a distant relative of Carlo Gambino, the late crime boss.

    Actually, the three Gambino brothers, although born in Italy, were nephews of Carlo Gambino, not cousins, or at least that’s what Johnny Romano Gambino used to say in 1974. Carlo Gambino died in 1976.

    Another Voice in reply to Mercyneal. | August 18, 2015 at 7:35 pm

    “Wondering if Obama has Ok’d the leaks.”

    The details of how this needs to play out for Hillary (and Bill) was decided before the 9th hole was over and had nothing to do with making par on the course.

Hillary: ‘I did not send classified material and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified.’

See Hillary parse.

She didn’t receive anything marked as “classified” because someone at the other end removed the marks before pressing ‘send’.

    Not A Member of Any Organized Political in reply to stevewhitemd. | August 18, 2015 at 6:35 pm

    That would be Obama?

    Sammy Finkelman in reply to stevewhitemd. | August 18, 2015 at 7:14 pm

    She didn’t receive anything marked as “classified” because someone at the other end removed the marks before pressing ‘send’.

    Well, that’s one question. It’s not supposed to be possible to transfer a document marked classified from a classified to an unclassified system.

    So maybe they are talking about contents that should have been classified.

    Or maybe somebody went to a bit of trouble to make it possible to actually transmit a document marked classified.

    For instance if the same computer was connected both to the classified system and to the Internet. The file could have been saved on a hard drive, edited, and then sent somewhere else.

    But it is not clear exactly what they are saying.

      As someone who has worked extensively with both classified and unclassified systems, if someone did what you are proposing, they should make sure to get the correct measurements for their prison jumpsuit.

      Moving a computer between classified/unclass systems breaks a rather long list of federal laws before you even get into the “spillage” issue.

      Bruce Hayden in reply to Sammy Finkelman. | August 18, 2015 at 8:58 pm

      As I Understand it, in the original batch of classified documents found were one or two that would only have been received by the state dept properly marked as classified – but the emails were no longer marked as classified. From my point of view, one of her minions appears to have removed the classified markings when they moved the email from the classified system to one where they could send it to Hillary’s private server.

      I don’t think this problem is going away, since if this is the case, the minion/s likely committed federal crimes, and they are going to be fairly easy to prove. We shall see.

First, the reason she is taken responsibility is because she realizes that once her inner circle starts to crumble and the sharks are already circling, she’s in real trouble. It was the I’ve got your back, don’t roll on me statement.

Second, That’s hilarious that the judge gave them a 1 hour extension! HAHAHA

    The Judge gave them no such thing.

    The Judge noted that the COURT’S schedule necessitated that the hearing be moved from 12:00 to 1:00 PM.

    That is the “Slap across the face” to the State Department that the Court is at the top of the food chain, and playing games with litigation (pissing off everybody and making everybody expend unnecessary funds) will result in the Judge bringing down the hammer and making the “game playing” side miserable by doing stuff like cutting short planned vacations on threat of contempt of Court (because I am just SURE that those FOIA managers are going to love having to leave their families and having their plans disrupted to return to Texas IN PERSON for the hearing).

      I hope you’re right about the court demanding respect, congress hasn’t with anyone and it couldn’t buy it now. That said, if someone open up with “before we start, Mrs. Clinton, I’d like to thank you for your service,” I think I’ll be sick.

“Hillary in a speech today in Nevada says she was the one to make the decision as to what was and was not work related. So she just made herself the key person to testify on the subject”

This could be a red herring. Hillary could be setting herself up to testify about the email selection process in order to prevent investigators from grilling those actually responsible – people who may crack. If Hillary fields these questions, she won’t have to rely on others to lie for her – she’ll do what she does best, lie for herself.

    Sammy Finkelman in reply to DaveGinOly. | August 18, 2015 at 7:20 pm

    She has been saying all along she was charged with making the decision as to what was, and was not, work-related, and so was everybody else in the federal government who used e-mail.

    And she’s correct.

    Of course other people made that decision more or less contemporaneously.

      I don’t believe any individual has the final say in what constitutes “work-related.” The Dep’t has persons charged with doing that, in accordance with FOIA. My understanding is that everything gets reviewed, no exceptions.

      The lack of review, and the fact of TS material identified in emails is likely causing the responsible persons to wet their pants about now. I suspect there are a lot of whistles blowing, but we don’t hear it yet because they use the appropriate channels. I.e., there are whistleblower phone numbers available, even multiple numbers giving options to the caller to choose who to call, keeping anonymity if they desire.

      This whole charade is mind-blowing. If it wasn’t Hill, she’d be in SCIFs all day answering questions. All her devices would have been confiscated, and devices of her close cohorts, possibly to the point of shutting down networks all over the State Department. The classified material has to be found, removed, and followed to wherever it went. But not for Hill. Unbelievable.

      DaveGinOly in reply to Sammy Finkelman. | August 18, 2015 at 9:11 pm

      Any way you cut it, she’s ultimately responsible both for what was deleted (whether she did it personally or not) and the decision to delete it. By taking personal responsibility, she may also be trying to defuse any objection to her attorney’s lack of a security clearance, but she’d still be on the hook for merely transferring it to him even if he never looked at it. One way or another, Hillary is toast. There is no scenario in which she doesn’t end up responsible for committing various crimes.

    Bruce Hayden in reply to DaveGinOly. | August 19, 2015 at 4:22 am

    My fIrst problem is that we are talking about a lot of work, and it was supposedly done after Congress and the courts started demanding her email. Figure since the first of the year or so, and this was during a time when she was starting her run for the Presidency, meeting with pre-selected interested voters, as well as a lot of fund raisers. Plus a new grand baby. Etc. I think that it is highly unlikely that she went through all 50k or so emails herself, one by one.

    Then there is the problem that the emails provided Congress, and maybe the courts have been sanitized. There is apparently a gap of maybe 2 months in her Lybia related emails right around the time of the Benghazi attacks. Four Anericans, including one of her ambassadors, died, and no email? That in itself would be malfeasance (but likely not illegal). Being suspicious, I expect that this is just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to sanitizing her email – after all, who finds credible that 20k of 50k emails she received during this time were personal? If she sticks with her story of doing the deletions, or at least deciding what to delete, she essentially admits to being the one to sanitize her emails. That means that she would be opening herself up to both contempt of Congress and obstruction of justice.

    And then there is the problem of shifting stories. Up until just recently, the story was that her attorneys did it, using search criteria. But it appears that that would have been a crime on their part, and maybe hers too (since she directed that Classified and Sensitive information be turned over to parties w/o proper security clearances, etc). It is reasonable that Kindall and his firm actually did the work, because he has done this sort of thing for the Clintons for years.

    My guess, at this early date, is that her taking responsibility for the selection and deletions of emails was tactical. Her attorney has been asked by Congress about what sort of security clearances he and his minions had when possessing, reviewing, selecting, and deleting her emails. Moreover, someone sanitized the emails. Ethically, any attorney, from Kendall down, dealing with these emails, could find themselves disbarred. I would guess that the firm’s internal ethics and malpractice people are having a meltdown right now. Hillary taking responsibility may take some of the pressure off them.

    Of course, she is likely to face the flip side of this at some point. Someone has been obstructing justice. And that is when we are again going to find out that it all depends on the definition of “is”. I expect her to flip and try to say that she never took personal responsibility, but rather meant that the buck stops with her (and then maybe point out how much she respects President Truman), and she can’t be held responsible for what her minions do, etc.

      Bruce Hayden in reply to Bruce Hayden. | August 19, 2015 at 4:58 am

      Let me quickly clarify my point about ethics and malpractice. In my experience, larger law firms have someone or a group tasked with overseeing ethical and malpractice risks. Sometimes the attorney in charge is titled “corporate counsel”. This is a big thing because the bigger firms often partially self insure (which means that the partners/shareholders would pay), and to the extent that they don’t, malpractice insurance premiums would go up with large claims. A big enough malpractice claim could wipe out the firm, and maybe even its attorney owners. The people involved in this in large firms often have quite a bit of power for this reason. My experience is that if the threat is big enough, they will drop everything, and marshall the resources needed.

      The problem here, I think, is that people have been asking for at least the last couple of weeks about security clearances for the lawyers involved with Hillary’s email server. Earlier this week, it was made official with a request from Congress about their security clearances. There is nothing in the law that would allow an attorney to legally access classified information just because their client can legally do so. The client’s security clearance is personal, and cannot be delegated. If it is a crime for a member of the general public to mishandle Sensitive or Classified information, it is the same crime if an attorney does so, even if their client had the proper security clearance to legally do the corresponding act. In short, being a legally licensed attorney is irrelevant when it comes to dealing with classified information.

      Which is why I suspect that the ethics/malpractice group in this law firm may have gone “woops”, “we have a problem”. And quite possibly, they told Hillary that they would have to withdraw if she didn’t get them off the hook. We shall see as this continues to evolve.

Henry Hawkins | August 18, 2015 at 7:26 pm

Hillary is about to learn a hard lesson she should have learned long ago, being a career crook and all – there is no loyalty among underlings once the po-po get them in the box.

    Sammy Finkelman in reply to Henry Hawkins. | August 18, 2015 at 7:44 pm

    So far, somebody else has always taken the fall – nobody has turned on them.

    But that’s only so long as everything doesn’t start spilling out.

      Hillary isn’t a rising star any longer. Once the left realizes the old and used up formerly dynamic due can’t do anything but harm them, they’ll throw them overboard in a heartbeat.

Looking forward to the investigation on how she’s paying the legal bills.

Sammy Finkelman | August 19, 2015 at 12:29 pm

Some comments: The thumb drives that exist now are not all the thumb drives that ever existed.

Hillary’s lawyers first had to work through all of her e-mail. Perhaps they didn’t work from a backup, but they might have copied it all on to thumb drives.

They negotiated with the State Department what would be considered work e-mails and/or responsive to the subpoena of the State Department (at that stage she was not herself subpoenaed since nobody outside the State Department knew she had the only copies of her work e-mails)

After they had selected what to turn over to the State Department, and the State Department agreed to accept that as complete, a copy of what they turned over was put on a thumb drive (or perhaps it was used to print them out) and the thumb drive plus two backups of the thumb drive, were retained by her lawyers, and all data not turned over, where you probably have strong evidence of criminal culpability, was deleted (although maybe secretly kept somewhere)

The lawyers at some point later arranged for State Department permission to retain a copy of the records they had turned over (under the assumption none were classified more than Confidential.)

But at the same they were forbidden to hand it over to someone else voluntarily (or even under subpoena, according to her lawyers)