Citizens United Sues State Department for Clinton Aides' E-mails

[Martha Stewart Went To Jail For Much Less]

Conservative group Citizens United filed a Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit on Monday asking that a judge force the
State Department to release e-mails between top Hillary Clinton
aides, Clinton Foundation officials, and employees of the
Clinton-connected consulting firm Teneo.

Suspecting inappropriate coordination between State Department
officials and the Clintons’ byzantine network of charity and
business interests, Citizens United first sought the messages
through six separate public records requests in October and
November of last year. But months later, the State Department
still hasn’t responded, leading the watchdog group to seek legal
redress.

“What they do is they acknowledge receipt, and then it goes into
a black hole,” says Citizens United president David Bossie,
adding that litigation has proven the only successful avenue to
obtain the public records upon which their investigations rely.

Monday’s suit specifically seeks e-mails from four State
Department employees who Citizens United believes improperly
collaborated with Clinton Foundation officials and private
consultants at Teneo. It comes the same day as a bombshell Fox
News report claimed that the FBI is widening their probe into
Hillary Clinton’s private server to include potential public-
corruption charges. One anonymous official said the agency is
now investigating “the possible intersection of Clinton
Foundation donations, the dispensation of State Department
contracts, and whether regular processes were followed.”

That’s precisely the “intersection” Citizens United hopes to
illuminate with its lawsuit, which seeks e-mails from four close
Clinton aides. The first two, Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin
and Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, will be familiar to those who
have followed the scandal surrounding Clinton’s private server.
Citizens United’s lawsuit expands an earlier request covering
communications during Abedin’s time working simultaneously at
the State Department and Teneo as a “special government
employee” to include Mills and Abedin’s entire tenures at the
State Department. The other two officials, Melanne Verveer and
Michael Fuchs, have largely avoided the scrutiny of Citizens
United and other watchdog groups until now. Verveer was
Clinton’s chief of staff during her time as First Lady, before
the two co-founded a women’s leadership nonprofit in the early
2000s. She was appointed United States ambassador-at-large for
women’s issues in 2009, a title she held throughout Clinton’s
term as secretary of state.

In several e-mails released publicly from Clinton’s private e-
mail account, Verveer appeared to facilitate favors and meetings
with Secretary Clinton for those close to the Clinton
Foundation. In one e-mail from July 28, 2011, Verveer forwarded
a meeting request from Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi banker and
Clinton Global Initiative participant. And in several messages
between 2010 and 2012, she seems to act as the liaison between
Clinton and Ukrainian billionaire Viktor Pinchuk, a top Clinton
Foundation donor. “We suspect Melanne Verveer was dabbling in
Foundation donor mayhem as a State Department employee,” says
one Citizens United analyst.

Fuchs, the other name included in the lawsuit, was a special
advisor to then-Secretary of State Clinton, and is copied on
several e-mails sent from Clinton Foundation employee and Bill
Clinton aide Amitabh Desai to Hillary Clinton’s top staff,
including Mills and Abedin. Those e-mails concerned Bill
Clinton’s request to give paid speeches to delegations in North
Korea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It’s not clear
why Fuchs was involved in these deliberations — a question
Citizens United hopes to answer through their FOIA lawsuit. It’s
not the first time the group has sued the State Department in
the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C. Last year, they
sought to compel the release of records related to Clinton’s
State Department schedule and the photos, videos, and hotel
bills from her international travels. Read the full text of
Monday’s lawsuit below:

https://www.scribd.com/embeds/295160292/content?start_page=1&vie
w_mode=scroll&show_recommendations=false

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429580/state-department-
sued-clinton-aides-emails-conservative-group