Court orders State Department to release more Benghazi emails

  Judicial Watch announced today a judge has ordered the State Department to release the unredacted versions of some emails which were released previously in redacted form. These emails are related to Barack Obama’s phone calls which he made to foreign leaders following the terrorist attack in Benghazi.

  Here is more:

Judicial Watch today announced that U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson has ordered the U.S. Department of State to turn over to Judicial Watch “eight identical paragraphs” of previously redact [sic] material in two September 13, 2012, Hillary Clinton emails regarding phone calls made by President Barack Obama to Egyptian and Libyan leaders immediately following the terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi.  Both emails had the subject line “Quick Summary of POTUS Calls to Presidents of Libya and Egypt” and were among the emails stored on Clinton’s unofficial email server.  Judge Jackson reviewed the documents directly and rejected the government’s contention that the records had been properly withheld under the FOIA B(5) “deliberative process” exemption.

Judge Jackson ruled:  “the two records, even if just barely predecisional, are not deliberative. [The State Department] has pointed to very little to support its characterization of these two records as deliberative, and the Court’s in camera review of the documents reveals that they do not fall within that category.”

The full emails may reveal what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama knew about the September 11, 2012, terror attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi.

Following Judge Jackson’s March 20 ruling, the State Department asked the court reporters to reconsider.  The State Department argued that, due to an internal “mistake,” it failed to claim that the emails were classified and, therefore, exempt from production under FOIA Exemption B(1).

  I do not expect much to come from this but it will be interesting to learn if Barack Obama was telling the leaders of Libya and Egypt one story while feeding the American people another story altogether. 

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium