Hillary Clinton Can’t Be Deposed Over Use of Private Email Server, Appeals Court Rules
A federal appeals court panel has unanimously overturned a lower-court order requiring Hillary Clinton to provide a sworn deposition about her use of a private email account and server during her four years as secretary of State.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, 3-0, that the conservative group Judicial Watch was not entitled to depose Clinton in connection with an 8-year-old Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking records of details about information national security adviser Susan Rice discussed during interviews in 2012 about the deadly attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.
During the protracted litigation surrounding the email saga, Clinton answered written questions under penalty of perjury about her email practices.
However, in March of this year, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the former first lady, Cabinet official and two-time Democratic presidential candidate to sit for a deposition. Lamberth, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan who has tangled with Clinton administration aides in a series of cases for decades, called Hillary Clinton’s earlier answers “incomplete, unhelpful, or cursory, at best.”
“The district court has impermissibly ballooned the scope of its inquiry into allegations of bad faith to encompass a continued probe of Secretary Clinton’s state of mind surrounding actions taken years before the at-issue searches were conducted by the State Department,” the court (D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals) found.
