Clinton Email Scandal UpdateState Dept. PAYS Judicial Watch $97k! Judicial Watch

If it weren’t for judicial watch, you wouldn’t know one thing about the Clinton emails. Back to Hillary. We had a major announcement this week. I’ll just, let me go to the videotape again where I announced it earlier this week, and be prepared. You’re going to see a picture of Hillary Clinton, so it may trigger you, but here we go. Hey, everyone, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton here with some breaking news about Hillary Clinton herself.

We just settled our big Hillary Clinton email scandal lawsuit. This is the FOIA lawsuit about Benghazi initially that led to the uncovering of Clinton’s email system that she tried to hide and involved the misuse and abuse of classified information and pay to play scandals and such. Well, the State Department just settled that with us for $97,000. Now, this lawsuit led to this woman losing the presidency. That was the consequence of it.

And of course, President Trump won the presidency. So in many ways, this is the most important FOIA lawsuit in american history. Now, of course, Hillary Clinton ignored the law, but still received special treatment from both the courts and law enforcement. Unfortunately, and for countless Americans, this double standard of justice destroyed their confidence in the fair administration of justice, a confidence which remains diminished to this day. But Americans would never have known about Hillary Clinton’s classified email scam, her related pay to play scandals, but for Judicial Watch’s diligence.

So big news today. The Hillary Clinton email scandal is over, but Hillary Clinton’s never going away. So never forget. So let me give you the background on this story. It all began with the Benghazi attack in 2012, September 11, 2012. We saw immediately they were lying about what happened there. We began a series of lawsuits, FOIA requests, followed by lawsuits to gain access to that information. And the one thing we noticed about our initial Benghazi lawsuit, this is the lawsuit that really broke open the Benghazi scandal, because we were able to get documents that Congress hadn’t been able to get, and it led to the creation of a select committee.

And this key document that we obtained was a White House document showing that they were the ones who came up with the big lie, that it was a video that made them do it, as opposed to the terrorists that quite obviously were involved in the killing and murder of our U. S. Ambassador, his associate in the state Department, a young guy, and then two special operators associated with the CIA.

A few hours later, one thing we noticed in those documents was there were no Hillary Clinton emails. Shortly thereafter, we filed another lawsuit, and we basically got back the same types of emails we had had in the initial email, in the first big lawsuit I told you about, and Ramona Kutka, who was our lawyer on the team, maybe we can throw up a picture of at least me and Ramona or a picture of Ramona.

I think we had some videos this week that we posted of interviews we had done about Ramona’s fights for the documents. But Ramona saw that in the next set of lawsuits or in this big lawsuit we’re talking about, that they just gave us more of the same, basically a repeat. And she said, is there anything else there? What about Hillary’s emails? And their response was kind of cryptic.

It was in the end of 2014. And they said, oh, well, we may have some other, something else. And then finally in February, I think it was of 2015, they admitted to the court that we’ve given judicial watch everything, everything but this other set of documents we have. And then a few weeks later, it’s leaked. It was Hillary’s emails. And so as a result, the judicial watches FOIA litigation.

They were forced to admit they had the emails. And the emails led, as I highlight in my introductory video to you, to Hillary Clinton being caught up in a criminal investigation that was largely wired because we saw up front, because we were up close to it how it was wired. But we also exposed through this litigation that I’m talking about now and other lawsuits that involved Hillary Clinton’s emails, the handling of her emails by Yuma Ahmedin, her husband, then husband.

Now I’m forgetting her husband’s name, Anthony Weiner. Anthony Weiner, that’s right. How could I forget Anthony Weiner’s name? And then we had gotten all of these documents from her emails and Yuma Abadin’s emails documenting pay to play at the Clinton State Department, where their donors, including foreign nationals, were using their contacts with the Clinton foundation to get in good and get favors from the Clinton State Department. And that essentially just led to her losing the election.

Now, others will say, well, there are other reasons she lost, but this was the primary reason. The whole situation around her scandal led, in my view, to her losing the election. Now, did we do it to make her lose the election? No. When we began asking for these records, I personally thought she wasn’t even going to run for president. So her running for president, to me at least, was a surprise.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’m not as smart politically as people think. I’m kind of naive, I think, why would she want to run for president again given her record? Well, some people are just awful enough that they think they can do anything they want with no accountability. And in Hillary’s case, she’s guessed largely right about that. But she did get accountability through at least our litigation.

And there was kind of a rough form of accountability in the election contest because Trump won and she lost, right? So if the american people were sitting as a grand jury on election day, they voted guilty, right, for Hillary when they elected President Trump to office. So this litigation exposed so much in the way of corruption not only by Hillary Clinton and criminality by Hillary Clinton. And I say this litigation, but the whole series of litigations around this issue by Judicial Watch, I would have to write a book, indeed, we have written books about how important the disclosures were in this litigation.

I’m going to go through a few of the disclosures, and this stuff is worth going over again because it’s so outrageous that nothing was done about it in terms of criminal prosecutions. And when you compare and contrast what Hillary did in terms of walking off with classified information and government documents, no, they weren’t her personal emails. When she wrote about government business and then left office, they became government emails.

And by their own admission, they were government emails because we wouldn’t have been able to get them through FOIA if they were just her, quote, personal emails. Listen to this. John Hackett, who was a former it professional information programs and services director, testified he had raised concerns that former secretary of State Hillary Clinton staff may have called 30,000 of the secretary’s personal emails without following national archive standards.

The same agency that wants to jail Trump for asserting his executive prerogatives in terms of holding records, let Hillary destroy records, and no crimes were prosecuted. He also revealed that he believed there was interference with the formal FOIA review process related to the classification of Clinton’s Benghazi emails. Now, I’m convinced this is kind of a weird thing for a transparency group to complain about, but I’ve looked at, I would fair to say, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of documents over my decades at judicial Watch now.

And when I looked at the Clinton emails and records that they were producing from her email cache, it occurred to me that we were getting documents that typically would have been considered classified. In my experience, you kind of know what the triggers are for classification because we’re always arguing about it, because we’re always saying this shouldn’t be classified, and they tell us why it’s classified. And so based on what the government often told us, I saw that they were not classifying records that they probably could have.

And you know why? Because the more records they classified, the more legal liability and political liability Hillary had. So they were willing to, in my view, release information that arguably should have been classified to protect. Mean that’s how craven they were. And this is what I think that official was referencing. Heather Samuelson, Hillary Clinton’s White House liaison at the State Department. So she worked for her at the State Department and then later became her personal lawyer, admitted under oath she was granted immunity by the Department of Justice in June of 2016.

So her lawyer, by the way, was also the one who, quote, deleted those 30,000 emails and they granted her immunity for doing it. Justin Cooper, the former aide to Bill Clinton and the Clinton foundation employee who set up the domain of the unsecured clintonemail. com server, testified he worked with Yuma Abadine to create the non governmental email system. And Abadine was working at the State Department at the time.

We also got the FBI, a senior FBI official, to admit that Obama knew how they found Clinton emails in the Obama White House, specifically the executive office of the president. Jake Sullivan, who’s now the national security advisor for President Biden, he was a Clinton aide. You didn’t know that, I’m sure, because the media doesn’t like to tell you the backgrounds of their friends. But if Jake Sullivan were a Republican and he had a similar background, he’d never be in the White House.

He and Clinton used her unsecure non governmental email system to conduct official state Department business. So her top advisor knew she was doing this in the State Department. A secretary of state for diplomatic security twice warned Clinton about using unsecure blackberries and personal emails to transmit classified information. So she was warned. It wasn’t like she was just doing it innocently, like no one warned her about it. She was warned twice.

So that’s just kind of like the surface of what happened. Of course, in this case also, we had Hillary Clinton ordered to be deposed by a District court judge, George Royce Lamberth. And Judge Lamberth, kind of year, I think it was two or three years after the cases had percolated before he authorized us to allow her to be opposed. And what happened was she went and appealed that ruling to the DC court of Appeals in an extraordinary, what they call mandamus action.

It’s very unusual. You’re basically kind of short circuiting the regular appeals process to get the appeals court to stop the lower court from doing something. And of course, the leftists on the Court of Appeals granted Hillary a dispensation from having to testify. They basically upended FOIA law and agreed that she’s too busy to have to testify about records she took by the tens of thousands, including classified records, to thwart our FOIA request.

So she got this special protection from the courts. Susan Rice was supposed to be deposed, too. She knew about the Benghaza emails. They protected her. Really outrageous. So it’s been years now, 2015, 14. It’s almost ten years. It was ten years younger, and we, in my view, broke open the biggest scandal to date at that time, and it changed the course of history. So when you’re in FOIA, you usually are able to get fees.

If you kind of, let me start over. If you succeed in your lawsuit, in getting the government to release documents, and I’m really kind of simplifying it, you are able to get certain fees for your trouble. And obviously we succeeded and then some with Clinton. Now, the problem with asking for fees is that the government often opposes it, and so you could create a lot of additional time and expense in fighting over the fees.

But in this case, the government agreed with us to settle and gave us an amount of $97,000. And it did clear we did get the deposit. Let’s show the deposit. There you have it. State treasure came to us on January, excuse me, February 20, 2024. $97,000. So it’s a settlement. So a settlement. To be clear, um, they don’t admit doing anything wrong, and we can’t use that settlement to say they did anything wrong.

But certainly people can draw their own conclusions about why they settled. Right? So it’s a big deal. I mean, the Clinton email scandal is over, but Hillary’s still out there. She set up, her foundation’s in the influence peddling game again. So she’s got the for sale sign out there. I’m convinced she still wants to be president of the United States. Politically, I don’t understand why she would still be out there making all these comments and involved in public policy if she didn’t have her sights on the presidency.

Certainly, I think she sees Joe Biden as someone who might leave the presidency soon, and so she may want to step in again. And I think these corruption scandals are going to erupt again because to me, they’ve never been handled fully and appropriately. So I’m upset about the way Hillary Clinton got away with a lot, but as I described earlier, there was a lot she didn’t get away with, and she was held accountable to a certain extent.

And let me be clear, if it weren’t for judicial watch, you wouldn’t know one thing about the Clinton emails. If it weren’t for judicial watch and our disclosures about her emails we’d probably be in a second Clinton administration right now. And as I said it’s not because we were opposing her nomination or candidacy because that’s not what we do. That was the consequence of what we did. So it’s quite the historic lawsuit and I would submit that our Benghazi litigation which led to the creation of the select committee which uncovered the Clinton emails was the most significant non governmental investigation in american history in terms of its impact.

So it’s vindication in my view to have this case end the way it did. But I have a feeling when it comes to Clinton corruption we haven’t seen the end of it though so you can be sure we’ll be continuing our keeping an eye on the Clinton machine up there in Chapaqua. Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button and like our video down below don’t.

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