September 30, 2016 | No Comments
A federal judge ruled Friday that the State Department was under no obligation to look outside its own files for records of Hillary Clinton’s phone calls on the night of the deadly Benghazi attacks.
U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer said State’s searches of its own documents and databases were sufficient to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act brought by Veterans for Strong America, a nonprofit group promoting national defense.
“Plaintiffs offer no basis to require additional efforts to obtain telephonic records, about which they speculate, since State has no FOIA obligation to make that attempt,” wrote Collyer, an appointee of President George W. Bush.
The judge noted that State wrote to Clinton in 2014 seeking all federal records that were in her possession or might come into her possession and that the letter was not limited to emails. That letter led her to turn over to State about 54,000 pages of messages from her private account, but no other records were provided.
“What Plaintiffs want to happen now is beyond the purview of FOIA. To the extent that the records they seek are outside State’s possession and control, State is not required to search for them,” the judge’s opinion said.
Collyer cited a 1980 Supreme Court ruling that State could not be forced under FOIA to recover records that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had deeded to the Library of Congress. However, she did not address a federal appeals court ruling in July that records in an official’s private email account can sometimes be agency records subject to FOIA.
A lawyer for the veterans group, Brad Moss, said an appeal is possible.
“We are disappointed in Judge Collyer’s ruling, particularly her view that Federal agencies are at the mercy of individual government employees’ willingness to produce agency records stored outside of government control,” Moss said in a statement. “Respectfully, we believe that view is inconsistent with recent case law and we are evaluating possible appeal options.”