The suit before Judge Royce Lamberth seeks records from Hillary Clinton’s office relating to talking points U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice used in TV appearances after the 2012 Benghazi attack. | AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite Legal Judge complains he was lied to by feds in Clinton email suit, then retreats Conservative group wants to question former secretary of state about email fiasco

A federal judge complained Friday that he was lied to by the State Department in a suit related to Hillary Clinton’s private email server, but he later backed off his claim, saying he may have been mistaken.

At a hearing on a Freedom of Information Act case about talking points related to the 2012 Benghazi attack, Judge Royce Lamberth complained that officials told the court that they had completed searching the agency’s records for information on the topic even though they knew that Clinton and other officials had used private email accounts for official business.


“The State Department told me it had produced all the records,” Lamberth complained. “That was not true at the time. It was not true. It was a lie.”

Justice Department attorney Robert Prince repeatedly interrupted, denying the judge’s claim.

“It was not a lie, your honor,” Prince said during the tense exchange. He went on to say that while the State Department had not immediately revealed the internal effort to recover Clinton’s emails, it did search those messages soon after receiving them.

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Prince insisted, however, that State’s view was that as a legal matter it was not obligated to search records not in its possession at the time a FOIA request came in.

“That’s doublespeak,” Lamberth replied. “Are you playing the same word games she played?” he asked.

Later in the hearing, Lamberth said he might have jumbled the sequence of events and a court declaration State submitted on the subject may have been inaccurate.

“I have to go back and read it,” he said. “I may have misremembered.”

Prince did concede some failures in the way the matter was handled, but he said none amounted to “bad faith” or lying to the court. He said people involved in the suit, brought by the conservative group Judicial Watch, were not immediately aware of the effort underway to recover Clinton’s emails.

“It’s true that we told Judicial Watch that State was done when it was not done,” Prince said. He noted that the issue of the handling of Clinton’s emails has been investigated by the FBI, State’s inspector general and by the House’s special Benghazi committee. “That was not great. The situation would have been better if someone knew. ... It’s not bad faith.”

“We’re saying that the whole oversight that did occur because of it has been resolved by this point,” Prince added.

However, Judicial Watch attorney Ramona Cotca asked that the group be allowed to take additional depositions, including one of Clinton.

Cotca noted that in January 2015 State reported to the court that all necessary searches for records had been completed, but at least some State officials knew by that point that Clinton had just delivered tens of thousands of pages to the agency.

“The status report was not forthcoming,” Cotca said.

The suit before Lamberth seeks records from Clinton’s office relating to talking points U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice used in TV appearances after the Benghazi attack. Some information in those talking points was inaccurate, but intelligence officials have said the talking points were the product of the best information they had at the time the materials were prepared.

Lamberth did not immediately rule on Judicial Watch’s motion for additional discovery.