WASHINGTON – Seven top State Department officials and aides to Hillary Clinton should not be questioned under oath about their handling of classified information on Clinton’s private email server as secretary of state or about pending FBI or inspector general investigations, the department said in a court filing late Tuesday.
The filing came in response to a plan by a conservative legal watchdog group to question current and former officials — including then-undersecretary for management Patrick Kennedy and Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills – to determine whether Clinton’s email arrangement thwarted federal open-records laws.
On Feb. 23, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered both sides to come up with a “narrowly tailored” plan in the Judicial Watch public records lawsuit. The State Department said Tuesday that it understood the order to mean that questioning be limited to “the reasons for the creation of [the clintonemail.com] system.”
“State submits that the scope of discovery must be limited and specified at the outset to prevent questioning that exceeds the limited inquiry that the Court has authorized,” the department said in court papers.
Off-limits topics include the substance of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act request for records concerning the employment status of Huma Abedin, then Mills’ deputy and now vice chairman of Clinton’s presidential campaign, as well as “the storage, handling, transmission, or protection of classified information, including cybersecurity issues; and questions about any pending investigations,” the department said.
The department also asked that it be given three days to review deposition transcripts and potentially contest their public release, and that questioning be completed eight weeks after a court order. That period could coincide with the final sprint for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Sullivan set an April 12 deadline for the sides to submit proposals, saying there is “a reasonable suspicion of bad faith” regarding the department’s apparent failure to ensure that agency records on Clinton’s server were secured within its own record systems.
It’s unclear whether aides who have left the department, including Mills, Abedin and Bryan Pagliano, a 2008 Clinton campaign staffer who helped set up the private server, can legally be required to respond. The State Department noted it could not accept deposition notices for “non-parties” to the FOIA suit. Pagliano reportedly was granted immunity in the FBI inquiry.
Judicial Watch’s proposal sought answers about department officials’ creation, maintenance, support or awareness of Clinton’s email system; any instructions given to department workers about communicating by email with Clinton and Abedin; and any inquiries into or discussions about disclosing Clinton’s use of the system.
The group also sought to identify who handled requests for email records from the secretary’s office, inventoried Clinton’s and Abedin’s information, or used an account on Clinton’s email server for official business.
