A conservative-leaning watchdog has claimed that the U.S. Department of State is “stalling again” on releasing emails sent or received by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Judicial Watch, a watchdog group that frequently files Freedom of Information Act (FOAI) lawsuits to expose misconduct by U.S. government officials, has been pressing for Clinton’s documents to be released. The group has more than 20 ongoing lawsuits against Clinton.
“I suspect liberal media interest in the Clinton email scandal will fade,” wrote Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton on Nov. 15, “but the public interest will remain high in securing accountability under the rule of law.”
He added that Judicial Watch lawyers filed a lawsuit a day before the election in an attempt to get more Clinton email disclosures when she was secretary of state.
“At the hearing, we found out that the FBI also turned over 31,000 other Clinton documents to the State Department. State suggested the court should wait as long as five years to see them,” he wrote.
Fitton alleged that the State Department is now “slow-walking the release” of deleted Clinton emails, which essentially “[guarantees] that the Clinton email scandal won’t be resolved for years.” The next hearing in the case is Nov. 29, when officials will discuss the 650,000 emails found on devices belonging to Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
Fitton then drew comparisons between the FBI reviewing the 650,000 emails in a week—just days before Election Day—and the State Department’s claims that it will take five years to process 31,000 State Department emails.
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