An appeals court this week ruled that more should have been done to recover emails on Hillary Clinton’s private server, according to an exclusive report from the Reuters news agency on Wednesday.
Judge Stephen Williams, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, issued the ruling, essentially resurrecting a legal challenge over how Clinton handled classified information as well as government emails when she was the secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. Her use of a private email server became a contentious issue during the 2016 campaign.
Clinton used the server at her home in New York to handle State Department emails before she handed over 55,000 pages to U.S. officials looking into her system. She didn’t release some 30,000 emails, saying they were not work-related and were for personal use.
Williams said that the State Department the National Archives should have put forth more effort into recovering those emails, Reuters reported. The agencies, he added, never asked the attorney general for assistance.
“The Department has not explained why shaking the tree harder—e.g., by following the statutory mandate to seek action by the Attorney General—might not bear more still,” Williams wrote. “Absent a showing that the requested enforcement action could not shake loose a few more emails, the case is not moot.”
The State Department didn’t issue a comment on the matter.
Friends Read Free