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The RNC filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the records last December and sued in March after it did not receive any information. | AP Photo Judge faults State over Clinton visitor records

A federal judge has rejected the State Department's handling of a request for records of visitors to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's office, ruling that officials there did not do an adequate search before they told the Republican National Committee that no such records were found.

"The narrow interpretation given by the agency to the Visitor Records Request improperly limited the scope of the search, rendering the search conducted in this case inadequate," Judge Beryl Howell wrote in an opinion issued Tuesday evening.

The RNC filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the records last December and sued in March after it did not receive any information. State officials later said they searched for visitor logs for Clinton's office and could not find any. They also said the building's visitor entry system did not record whether those cleared into the building were headed for Clinton's suite or not.

The Republicans protested, saying that an inspector general report indicated that Clinton's staff maintained an Outlook calendar of her appointments. State said that information wasn't covered by the RNC's request and wouldn't be a reliable indication of who actually visited the secretary.

Howell, a longtime Democratic Senate staffer who was appointed by President Barack Obama and currently serves as chief judge on her court, said State didn't fulfill its obligations.

"Parsing a FOIA request to exclude purportedly 'indirectly' responsive records, as the State Department suggests, would undercut the long-standing mandate to agencies to construe FOIA requests liberally," Howell wrote. "Certainly, the RNC’s Visitor Records Request could have been drafted with more clarity to cover scheduled meetings. Yet, many of the anticipated attendees likely did actually attend the scheduled meetings reflected in the contested records. ... Indeed, given the importance of attendance at a scheduled meeting with a public official the stature of the Secretary of State and/or in her office, visitors more than likely kept their scheduled attendance."

Howell ordered State to redo the search.

Spokespeople for the State Department and the Justice Department, which represents State in FOIA cases, declined to comment.

While the judge did not note it, the visitor log the Obama White House voluntarily releases does include appointments made but not kept. On the other hand, the appointments are often described in news reports as White House visits even when the records don't indicate that the visitor actually arrived.