The State Department on Wednesday scored a victory in one of the multiple, ongoing open records lawsuits related to Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonWhat Senate Republicans have said about election-year Supreme Court vacancies Bipartisan praise pours in after Ginsburg's death Trump carries on with rally, unaware of Ginsburg's death MORE’s personal email server because the request was overly broad.

Last year, the conservative legal watchdog group Judicial Watch asked the State Department to hand over “the number and names of all current and former officials, officers or employees” who had used any email accounts other than official “state.gov” emails for work purposes. The request appeared designed to determine who, in addition to Clinton, a former secretary of State and the front-runner for the Democrtatic presidential nomination, had used non-governmental email accounts for official business.

ADVERTISEMENT

But the State Department interpreted the request to be asking for a list of all employees who used alternate email addresses, which it did not have.

On Wednesday, a federal judge agreed, ruling that the poorly worded request pushed it outside the scope of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Judicial Watch’s request, Judge Rosemary Collyer of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote, “is really a question that asks ‘who at the State Department used private email for conducting official business?’”

“A question is not a request for records under FOIA and an agency has no duty to answer a question posed as a FOIA request.”

“FOIA does not require agencies to create documents,” Collyer added. “Accordingly, the State Department was not obligated to answer [Judicial Watch’s] question by compiling a list of State Department officials who used private email addresses to conduct Department business.”

Judicial Watch pushed back, claiming the State Department should not be interpreting requests in the narrowest possible sense.

But Collyer was unmoved.

“[I]t was plaintiff’s responsibility to frame its own FOIA request with sufficient particularity,” she wrote, “and plaintiff cannot now complain that it was looking for records that it did not describe.”

The ruling is a setback for Judicial Watch, which has doggedly pursued FOIA lawsuits connected to Clinton’s controversial private server, and repeatedly come out ahead.

In other cases, the conservative group has managed to convince two federal judges to open the door to interviews of top current and former State Department officials about Clinton’s email setup.

On Tuesday, State Department lawyers requested that those depositions be “limited” to the circumstances surrounding Clinton’s arrangement, and not the potential mishandling of classified information or an ongoing FBI probe.