Larry Klayman pushes for contempt proceedings against Clinton

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The fight over Hillary Clinton’s private email system is moving to the courts as a conservative legal activist presses for contempt proceedings against the former secretary of state and one of her top aides.

Longtime Clinton nemesis Larry Klayman filed motions late Thursday asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to send two cases pending there back to lower courts so they can explore whether Clinton’s use of a private email account during her tenure as secretary led to incomplete and inaccurate responses from the State Department to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

“Revelations that the Secretary of State – the highest relevant official in the U.S. Government very likely to be involved in granting waivers – maintained an email system off-the-books which admittedly was not searched demonstrates that an adequate search was not performed in response to the Plaintiff’s FOIA request,” Klayman wrote in one filing.

“Furthermore, the elaborate efforts to which then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton resorted to conceal the emails run through the unofficial server raise an inference that the emails are vulnerable to destruction if not immediately preserved,” wrote the conservative attorney, who heads an organization called Freedom Watch. “The purpose of setting up an email system apart from the U.S. Department of State’s official email system was to conceal the emails. Therefore, this motivation and efforts support the inference that the emails are likely to be lost if not promptly preserved.”

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One of Klayman’s requests pertained to waivers of sanctions against Iran. The court filings say the State Department located no records responsive to the request.

Another request sought information on U.S. cyberattacks against Iran, including the unleashing of the so-called Stuxnet computer virus reported to have set back Iran’s nuclear program. The latter request also focused on how New York Times reporter David Sanger learned of the effort. Klayman’s filings say the State Department claimed in that case that there were no relevant records in Clinton’s office.

“It cannot be disputed that the Defendant did not search the emails most likely to be both responsive to the FOIA request and most important in significance. The Defendant submitted affidavits that were false. This fraud on the court caused the court to grant summary judgment,” Klayman wrote.

The motions ask the courts to make sure Clinton’s emails are preserved intact, to allow Freedom Watch to conduct legal discovery into the email arrangement and to conduct a hearing on whether Clinton and her former chief of staff Cheryl Mills should be held in contempt of court over the agencies’ earlier responses.

There was no immediate response from the State Department or a spokesman for Clinton to the new legal moves.

The department said previously that Clinton sent copies of 55,000 pages of emails to the agency in December in response to a request sent to several former secretaries that they submit any work-related emails still held on personal accounts.

 

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