I sense a very strong undercurrent from the three-judge panel that they are inclined to grant Mandamus for Team Clinton not to grant requested discovery and to compel further depositions.
They repeatedly call JW's statements as "mere speculation" and the like. "What do you realistically hope to learn??!"
The judges' tone is enough to make one strongly believe there are multiple tiers of US justice.
Thanks for your responses.
I’m also not a lawyer. (I mostly despise lawyers and find it ironic that to a great extent, it is lawyers who are taking down the Deep State. So many thanks to those few good ones.)
Here are some of my impressions after listening to almost the entire thing...
1. I couldn’t tell how many lawyers were arguing on each side, but there was at least one Clinton lawyer who I thought sounded very nervous and panicked.
2. The Clinton lawyers kept making statement like “I’m confident that the State Department made a thorough search”. How can they be confident? Did they personally do the search? Why should anyone on the JW side accept that assertion? I don’t. They have every incentive to NOT do a thorough search and to take it on trust that they did is absurd.
3. The arguments seemed to center on whether JW was entitled to more searching. (Perhaps that was the crux of the case and the point being argued? Hard for me to tell.)
4. I though there was a deliberate attempt by the Clinton side to obfuscate what had and had not been searched and to obfuscate where the emails that were produced came from.
5. Are they shielding more than just HRC?
6. If I understood correctly, there was discussion about who else’s emails they searched and why that was sufficient. Again, iiuc, they searched the email of 4 other people. It is absurd to think that HRC only corresponded with 4 other people. So I don’t understand at all why only 4 persons’ emails were searched.
7. Did the judge say adjourned until December? WHAT??? How long will this drag out? What is the next step? Was this just a stalling tactic in the hopes that a D would be elected to sweep it all under the rug?