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State Department officials released roughly 2,900 pages of Hillary Clinton's private emails early Friday morning, several hours past their target of late Thursday evening. State first set a broad target of somewhere between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. Thursday. But as the night wore on, that shifted to a 2 a.m. estimate. They were finally released right around 1 a.m. The late release was on top of State's failure to release all the emails by New Year's Eve. Instead of releasing everything on Dec. 31, State said it needed another few days to finish the group of Clinton messages. The...

Complete Headline: State Department covered up Hillary's private email server for years even though 'dozens of senior officials' knew about it, says scathing inspector general report Critical report from State Department's own internal watchdog details abuse of Freedom of Information Act while Clinton ran the agency 177 of the 240 FOIA requests lodged for information about Hillary while she was secretary of state are still pending three years after she left office State told a liberal group it had no information about Hillary's emails in 2013 even though many senior officials were emailing her on her private server The U.S....

EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton’s unorthodox use of a private email account and personal server for government business exploited a loophole in the State Department's FOIA, or Freedom of Information Act, process, according to the findings of the first Inspector General report to stem from her email scandal. Congress asked the Office of Inspector General, the State Department's independent watchdog, to investigate the issue following the revelation that Mrs. Clinton did not use a government email account while secretary of state. Fox News reviewed the 25-page report and its findings before they were made publicly available. The report reads in part: "FOIA...

Judicial Watch Press Room: just-released State Department emails, written 24 hours after the Benghazi consulate attack, show former Clinton chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, quickly moved past condolences over the slayings to focus her attention on the design of her private companys logo. FOIA litigation forced Mills and other Clinton aides to turn over emails from non-State.gov accounts on which they conducted government business. The emails reference the logo design for the “cdmillsGroup,” a private company set up by Mills on January 3, 2013, a month before she left the State Department. The logo discussion includes another government employee, Jean-Louis...

Thousands of Hillary Clinton's private emails will hit the Internet on New Year's Eve thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that permits the State Department to wait until the end of each month to release the documents. The holiday email release will mark the eighth time the agency has published a batch of Clinton's records according to the monthly schedule. The first release came in May of this year and contained fewer than 300 emails, all of them related to Benghazi. Clinton's use of a personal server to shield her private emails from the public hobbled the early...

Secret Service in Cover-Up Mode on Obama Travel Costs State Department Rushed Approval for Hillary Clinton's Memoirs Happy ThanksgivingSecret Service in Cover-Up Mode on Obama Travel Costs There may be legitimate reasons for the Secret Service to keep some documents from the public. But concealing taxpayer-funded security expenses for Barack Obama's luxury vacations sure isn't one of them. That's why your JW has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the U.S. Secret Service for failing to respond to 19 Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for security-related expenses related...

Intrepid reporter Kathryn Watson at The Daily Caller News Foundation just wanted to get copies of administrative subpoenas issued by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC replied to her Freedom of Information Act request with obstruction. Nobody knows how many administrative subpoenas are issued by government agencies. Administrative subpoenas are warrants for records such as private “papers” and emails. They are issued unilaterally by government bureaucrats, and are impossible to reconcile with the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of "oath and affirmation" of "probable cause" before neutral judges. Watson and The Daily Caller News Foundation have been doing the work that Congress...

If you've seen news reports about suspicious state contracts or chemical waste pits or officials' text messages in the Waco biker shootout, you may notice a recurring theme: government records obtained through the Texas Public Information Act. Fortunately, our state’s public information law, created in the early 1970s, presumes government records are open unless a specific exemption in the law keeps the documents off-limits. The public has a right to know. That means all citizens - not only journalists - can access government records. "It's very easy," said award-winning reporter Melissa Correa of KRGV-TV in Weslaco, recently explaining her use...

The Supreme Court has rejected an anti-abortion group's bid to force disclosure of confidential Planned Parenthood and federal government records about a contract for family planning services in New Hampshire. The justices on Monday let stand a ruling that allowed the U.S. Health and Human Services Department to withhold some documents in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by New Hampshire Right to Life. ...

Full title: Fairfax County Public Schools Sues Judicial Watch To Keep “Transgender” Policy Records Secret before Key Election Fairfax County School Board Hires Private Law Firm, Court Today Questions Lawsuit as “Form over Substance” (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that on Friday, October 30, the Fairfax County School Board sued Judicial Watch rather than turn over records prior to Election Day concerning a controversial change in policy accommodating “transgender” students. The board filed suit in the Circuit Court of Fairfax County, Virginia ( Fairfax County Public Schools v. Judicial Watch, Inc. (No. 2015 14395)). At a calendar hearing...

Federal law requires that “Department of State employees with original or derivative classification authority for national security information must complete training on proper classification marking” (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that on October 16, 2015, it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State to obtain records about Hillary Clinton’s training on “making and marking” classified information. The lawsuit also seeks similar records for Clinton’s top State Department aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch v. U.S....

Judicial Watch Changes History On Benghazi New State Documents Show Quick White House Effort to Link Benghazi to Internet Video JW Uncovers Draft Hillary Clinton IndictmentJudicial Watch Changes History On Benghazi Yesterday, I had the honor of attending part of Benghazi Select Committee hearing featuring Hillary Clinton. Joining me was Judicial Watch attorney Ramona Cotca, one of the key JW attorneys litigating the federal open records lawsuits that forced both the creation of the Select Committee and the disclosure of Hillary Clinton’s illicit email system. As the Washington Post pointed out in a not-too-friendly piece, this hearing would not have...

State Department documents detail delays and lack of support in hours after attack (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released new State Department documents that raise more questions about the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the U.S. Special Mission at Benghazi, Libya. The documents show the White House contacted YouTube over an Internet video as one of its first moves after the initial attack. The documents, from the agency’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, were provided to Judicial Watch in response to a court order in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for...

Don’t feel lonely, Mrs. Clinton. You’re not the only public official shielding public actions from the public by using private modes of communication — a private email account and server, or texts on a personal cell phone. Meet fellow Democrat and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The Chicago Tribune took the Emanuel administration to court recently for the second time in three months. The paper* charges the mayor with “[violating] state open records laws by refusing to release communications about city business conducted through private emails and text messages.” Still pending is the World’s Greatest Newspaper’s first lawsuit against the mayor’s...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today announced that Judge Reggie B. Walton set a status conference tomorrow in litigation concerning former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email issue. The court is considering a request from Judicial Watch for a preservation order to protect all emails in the possession of Clinton, her lawyers and her former aides. The issue arises in a lawsuit brought on by Judicial Watch against the U.S. Department of State. Judicial Watch’s preservation order proposal would protect any emails Clinton and her lawyers unilaterally determined to be personal. (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:12-cv-02034))....

The Chicago Tribune is suing Mayor Rahm Emanuel over claims he violated open records laws for failing to disclose personal emails and texts used to conduct city business. Thursday’s lawsuit asks a judge to force the former White House chief of staff to produce documents. The lawsuit argues that the newspaper’s Freedom of Information Act requests to Emanuel’s administration have been “met with a pattern of non-compliance, partial compliance, delay and obfuscation.” …

A federal judge Thursday rejected the Obama administration’s efforts to halt all of the open-records lawsuits seeking access to former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails. Judge Richard J. Leon, without comment, rejected the Justice Department’s request for a stay in a short order posted online. He’s the first judge to rule on the request, which the department filed last week as it tries to get a single judge to oversee the more than 30 open-records cases seeking Clinton emails. Judge Leon’s rejection probably puts the nail in that idea, since it would take universal buy-in from the more...

If I were to approach a person on the street and list off traits like “doesn’t drive,” “needs food prepared,” “needs help with the remote control,” “needs people to bring her beverages,” “has trouble remembering things,” and “doesn’t pay her own bills” about someone anonymously, he wouldn’t think I was referring to a current presidential front-runner in the year 2015. He would think I was referring to his poor nana, whom he had to place in a home because she wouldn’t stop yelling at the lamp and was at risk of accidentally microwaving her dentures. But, as we now know...

The newly-released batch of Hillary Clinton emails provides further proof that Freedom of Information (FOI) law has been blatantly violated. The documents include material directly responsive to a FOI request I made back in 2012 after the Benghazi terrorist attacks on the U.S. compounds. However, the material was not produced at the time, as required by law. Once again, there appears to be nobody who holds government officials and agencies accountable for their routine violation of this law. So the infractions occur frequently and with impunity. If nobody polices our government officials and agencies–if they are above the law–then how...

A federal judge Friday ordered the IRS to turn over the records of any requests from the White House seeking taxpayers’ private information from the tax agency, delivering a victory to a group that for two years has been trying to pry the data loose. It’s not clear that there were any such requests — but Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the IRS cannot just refuse to say so by citing taxpayer confidentiality laws, known as section 6103 of the tax code. “This court questions whether section 6103 should or would shield records that indicate confidential taxpayer information was misused,...