A federal judge has ordered former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to submit to a deposition by lawyers for the conservative group Judicial Watch over her fateful decision to use of a private email server.

Judge Royce Lamberth issued the order in response to litigation by the group that has dragged on for more than five years and seeks the public release of information from Clinton's tenure at the State Department.

'Any further discovery should focus on whether she used a private server to evade FOIA and, as a corollary to that, what she understood about State's records management obligations,' the judge wrote about the federal open records law.

A federal judge has ordered Hillary Clinton to be deposed in a lawsuit about her use of a private email server

The judge keyed in on what Clinton's own motive might have been for the unusual set-up.

'As extensive as the existing record is, it does not sufficiently explain Secretary Clinton’s state of mind when she decided it would be an acceptable practice to set up and use a private server to conduct State Department business," Judge Lamberth wrote.

She also called out the government for putting out the emails in a 'trickle.'

The Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act lawsuit stems from the deadly clash at the the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya.

Clinton and her team have long maintained she used a home email server out of convenience and that they made efforts to honor record-keeping laws by forwarding information to official government accounts.

Clinton's email practices became a source of controversy during her failed 2016 presidential campaign

The judge keyed in on what Clinton's own motive might have been for the unusual set-up

Scrutiny of Clinton's email practices, which Republicans condemned and which she ultimately apologized for, proved to be a major obstacle in her 2016 presidential loss to President Donald Trump. The judge also ruled longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills would have to be deposed in the suit.

The FBI probed her email practices during the campaign, and in a critical moment former FBI Director James Comey announced the decision not to charge her despite behavior he called careless.

The Ronald Reagan appointee previously served as the chief judge on the foreign surveillance intelligence court, as well as chief judge for the D.C. District Court. He wants the depositions to be completed in 75 days.

Clinton hasn't been deposed in person and under oath on the subject, although she was grilled in public during media appearances and debates. 'How did she arrive at her belief that her private server emails would be preserved by normal State Department processes for email retention?' the judge wanted to know. The judge ruled Clinton could get asked about recordkeeping as it relates to Benghazi, but not the Obama administration's response.