{"id":1354063,"date":"2022-03-02T05:07:39","date_gmt":"2022-03-02T10:07:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1354063"},"modified":"2022-03-02T05:07:44","modified_gmt":"2022-03-02T10:07:44","slug":"bidens-supreme-court-pick-shielded-top-clinton-aide-amid-email-scandal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/bidens-supreme-court-pick-shielded-top-clinton-aide-amid-email-scandal\/","title":{"rendered":"Biden\u2019s Supreme Court Pick Shielded Top Clinton Aide Amid Email Scandal"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">22<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fbidens-supreme-court-pick-shielded-top-clinton-aide-amid-email-scandal%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1354063&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/GettyImages-614373608-1-e1646169055381.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>President Joe Biden\u2019s Supreme Court nominee shielded one of Hillary Clinton\u2019s top State Department aides from scrutiny about his use of a personal email account to conduct official business.<\/p>\n<p>Then-U.S. district judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2015 denied <em>Gawker<\/em>\u2019s request for details about press aide Philippe Reines&#8217;s stewardship of the account in the context of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, which sought emails Reines traded with 34 different media outlets. Jackson blocked <em>Gawker<\/em>\u2019s request, calling it &#8220;extraordinary&#8221; and claiming there was no proof that Reines had acted in &#8220;bad faith&#8221; by using a personal email address.<\/p>\n<p>Like Clinton, Reines often communicated with the press via a personal email account. That meant his communiqu\u00e9s were not preserved on State Department systems. When <em>Gawker<\/em> filed a FOIA request for Reines\u2019s emails in September 2012, State Department officials were thus unable to turn up responsive records, prompting the lawsuit.<\/p>\n<p>The State Department asked Reines to turn over whatever government records were in his possession around the time of the <em>Gawker<\/em> lawsuit, which he did via his lawyers in July 2015, two years after he left government service. Jackson therefore agreed to give the State Department additional time to sort through the &#8220;new&#8221; Reines records and turn them over to <em>Gawker<\/em>. Jackson supervised that process and lawyers for the parties kept her up to date on their progress via status hearings and reports.<\/p>\n<p><em>Gawker<\/em> put the screws to Reines, seeking affidavits that swore he had turned over all relevant documents and describing his methods for surrendering records to State.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It is difficult to view the timeline of events surrounding the compilation of records responsive to <em>Gawker<\/em>\u2019s FOIA request as anything short of a bureaucratic and managerial catastrophe,&#8221; lawyers for <em>Gawker<\/em> wrote in a 2015 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scribd.com\/document\/561973666\/Gawker-v-Department-of-State-motion-to-compel\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">filing<\/a>. &#8220;State has provided scant information regarding why it was not until 2015 that it finally sought to gather the records from Mr. Reines.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Jackson denied that request, calling it &#8220;extraordinary.&#8221; She said that the State Department had no obligation under FOIA &#8220;to solicit or produce&#8221; documents in an ex-official\u2019s sole possession. And there\u2019s a crucial difference, she added, between producing requested documents\u2014which is within the scope of FOIA\u2014and the initial decision whether to retain said documents.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;An agency\u2019s threshold determination regarding which records to retain in its files is entirely distinct from the agency\u2019s subsequent search of maintained records pursuant to the FOIA\u2014and these two duties should not be conflated,&#8221; she wrote in an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scribd.com\/document\/561974036\/Gawker-Media-v-State-Department-opinion-and-order-on-motion-to-compel\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">opinion<\/a> denying <em>Gawker<\/em>\u2019s request.<\/p>\n<p>The decision was the only opinion Jackson handed down over the course of the dispute.<\/p>\n<p>Jackson\u2019s opinion parted ways with a colleague on the Washington federal trial court, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan. In a separate lawsuit, Sullivan required Clinton herself and two of her top aides, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, to submit affidavits along the lines <em>Gawker<\/em> sought. <em>Gawker<\/em>\u2019s request mentioned Sullivan\u2019s order and may have been based upon it.<\/p>\n<p>Jackson said the Reines case was different because there was evidence that Clinton\u2019s email system was designed to skirt FOIA altogether. In the Reines-<em>Gawker<\/em> fracas, she said there was a &#8220;total absence of any indicia of bad faith&#8221; on Reines\u2019s part.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, Reines explicitly wrote, &#8220;I want to avoid FOIA&#8221; on an email exchange from his personal account with John Heilemann and Mark Halperin in February 2009, around the time he joined the State Department. That indicia of bad faith was not in the record before Jackson so far as the <em>Washington Free Beacon<\/em> could tell.<\/p>\n<p>Reines\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/politics\/free-beacon-email-helped-cost-clinton-crony-campaign-gig\/\">colorful if bizarre<\/a> exchanges with the<em>\u00a0Free Beacon<\/em> over his spat with <em>Gawker<\/em> helped cost him a job on Clinton\u2019s 2016 presidential campaign. The clash ended when <em>Gawker<\/em> abandoned the case in 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>President Joe Biden\u2019s Supreme Court nominee shielded one of Hillary Clinton\u2019s top State Department aides from scrutiny about his use of a personal email account to conduct official business. Then-U.S.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1354063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1354063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1354063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1354063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1354063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1354063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1354063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}