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Bill and Hillary Clinton fight new demand for email server

Lawyers for former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have moved to block a conservative lawyer's effort to pry into emails stored on the Clintons' private server.

In a motion filed Thursday evening in federal court in West Palm Beach, Fla., the Clintons' attorneys ask that conservative gadfly Larry Klayman be temporarily barred from demanding information in connection with a racketeering lawsuit he filed in March against the couple and the Clinton Foundation. The suit alleges that the Clintons used the private email server to frustrate Freedom of Information Act requests Klayman filed for records about waivers of Iranian sanctions and about leaks relating to measures the U.S. and Israel took to deal with Iran's nuclear program.

During a telephone conference in the case Wednesday, federal magistrate Dave Brannon gave Klayman the go ahead to begin discovery — the process of demanding documents, evidence and testimony — relevant to the suit.

Within hours of the conference, an aide to Klayman sent the Clinton team demands for "private email servers and any documents or things" related to Iran sanctions waivers, the Stuxnet computer virus the U.S. and Israel reportedly deployed to disrupt Iran's nuclear efforts and releases of information about plans to strike Iranian nuclear facilities.

Now, the Clinton lawyers are asking to be relieved of any duty to comply with those requests until a pending motion to dismiss Klayman's suit is resolved. The Clintons' attorneys also warn that allowing access to their records under these circumstances would open the door to a flurry of similar efforts.

"To permit Plaintiff to obtain documents responsive to FOIA requests (to the extent any even exist) through civil 'discovery' in a meritless lawsuit against the former Secretary of State would set a dangerous precedent ripe for abuse," the Clinton legal team writes in its motion (posted here).

The Clintons' lawyers, headed by longtime attorney and friend David Kendall, also point to Klayman's long history of litigation against the former first couple — cases Kendall said have been unsuccessful.

"Plaintiff has sued former Secretary Clinton or President Clinton at least fifteen times. Almost all of those lawsuits have failed before or at the motion-to-dismiss stage, and Mr. Klayman has not prevailed on the merits on a single claim over his decades-long history of suing the Individual Defendants," Kendall wrote.

According to the new motion, Brannon said he couldn't entertain the Clintons' request to halt discovery because the issue hadn't been formally referred to him by the judge overseeing the case, Donald Middlebrooks — a Clinton appointee.

Klayman filed a 93-page amended complaint in the case Thursday night. The complaint (posted here) accuses the Clintons of running a "criminal enterprise" that involved accepting "bribes" in the form of donations to the Clinton Foundation and payments for speeches. The conservative lawyer says he was injured by the alleged conspiracy because he could have used the undisclosed FOIA documents to advance his livelihood and income as a public advocate.

Middlebrooks has set a trial date of January 25, if the Clintons don't succeed in knocking the case out before then.