Judicial Watch: Clinton's Conduct in Email Scandal 'Extraordinarily Dangerous'

A representative for the non-profit and non-partisan watchdog, Judicial Watch, did not mince words when speaking about why the group has taken such an active role in investigating Hillary Clinton's email practices.
 
"They're a very grave national security crime," Chris Farrell, director of research and investigations for the organization, told CBN News. "She engaged in fraud and misrepresentation to the U.S. District Court here. We had filed the Freedom of Information Act request lawsuit. The State Department said, 'Look, we gave you everything we have.' They lied when they said that."

CBN News spoke with Chris Farrell, director of research and investigations for Judicial Watch, about the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email practices. Watch that interview above. 

"They sheepishly came back to us about 10 months later and revealed that Mrs. Clinton had absconded with 60,000-plus emails," he continued. "That's extraordinary."

"No other cabinet officer in the history of the country has ever set up their own server to do an end-run around all the legitimate communications channels that exist," Farrell said. "No one else has ever put the country in this sort of grave intelligence problem by compromising sources and methods."

"It's just that Mrs. Clinton's conduct here is so over-the-top; it's so extraordinarily dangerous that we felt compelled to get these records and to pursue the truth," he continued.

The leader of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is pushing for new action in the investigation of Clinton's email practices as the FBI's latest revelations fuel new questions. 

Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, asked a federal prosecutor Tuesday to determine if Clinton or others working with her had any part in the deletion of thousands of her emails by a Colorado technology firm. 

The firm, Platte River Networks, oversaw her private computer server in 2015.

Chaffetz wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Channing Phillips, asking the Justice Department to investigate to "determine whether Secretary Clinton or her employees and contractors violated statutes that prohibit destruction of records, obstruction of congressional inquiries and concealment or cover up of evidence material to a congressional investigation."

"The bottom line is these documents were destroyed and they were records under subpoena," Chaffetz said. "Secretary Clinton has fought this every step of the way. The election should not slow down this probe."

"It's a good first step," Farrell told CBN News, referring to Chaffetz's letter. "But frankly, we've already had telegraphed to us the disgraceful decision of Director Comey, and really what I think will end up being an institutional embarrassment for the FBI because based upon the FBI 302s that were released last Friday, it's clear that the FBI, at the direction of Mr. Comey, was really just going through the motions." 

"It's a sad day for the FBI, and the director's disgraced himself," Farrell continued. "I don't know that a U.S. attorney, at the request of Mr. Chaffetz, is really going to move the ball, given that Loretta Lynch is sitting as our attorney general."

Clinton and her longtime aide and lawyer, Cheryl Mills, told the FBI that they did not know about the deleted emails. Clinton referred to Chaffetz's outline of the deleted emails as "his latest conspiracy theories."
  
"The FBI resolved all of this," she told reporters Tuesday on her flight to an appearance in Tampa, Florida. "Their report answered all of the questions."

The attorney for Platte River Networks declined to comment, and Mills' attorney was not immediately available to discuss Chaffetz's letters with reporters.

"Now you have Mrs. Clinton really attacking the discovery process affiliated with our litigation and a judge who was appointed by her own husband, Judge Emmet Sullivan," Farrell said. "It's an extraordinary claim to call legitimate questions about her unlawful activity a conspiracy theory. Nobody made Mrs. Clinton set that server up. She elected to do it herself."

Meanwhile, in an unusual move, the FBI released documents Friday related to its investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

According to the AP, the FBI report reveals actions on the part of Clinton's staff that appear to have the goal of preventing deleted information from being recovered, actions that included using a hammer to smash her old Blackberry smartphones and erasing one of her hard drives with special software.

"All of the, let's just call them troubling documents and emails in this case, have been released on the day before a holiday, and that's a deliberate effort to bury the information in the news cycle," Farrell told CBN News. "The FBI released the records because there's so much compelling public interest."

Farrell said more of Clinton's emails from her time as secretary of state will soon be made public -- nearly 15,000. In addition, he said Clinton must answer under oath 25 questions posed to her by Judicial Watch by the end of September.

"We are the only organization in the country to get Mrs. Clinton under oath," Farrell said. "Not even the FBI took a sworn declaration from her. We will."

"And I think it'll be very interesting to line up all the various things she said earlier, to our sworn declaration, to the follow-on emails that will be released, to some whistleblowers that I believe will be coming forward shortly," he continued.

"And when you line up all these pieces of information, I think the American public will have a very interesting examination or look at Mrs. Clinton's credibility because look, she, in my opinion, and I was a special agent of Army counterintelligence -- I've done national security crime investigations; I've put people in jail for it -- when you see the full record, it is absolutely clear that Mrs. Clinton mishandled national defense information and has been treated like no other federal government employee would ever be treated," Farrell said.
 
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and GOP allies have called for the appointment of an independent prosecutor.

CBN News reached out to Clinton, Lynch, Mills, and the State Department for comment. 

A State Department official issued the following statement to CBN News:

"The Department took a number of steps to request the return of records. In October 2014, we asked former Secretaries to send us any federal records uniquely in their possession. Secretary Clinton has said she turned over the federal records in her possession. We processed those documents for release and posted them on our public FOIA website. In September 2015, we asked the FBI to inform us should it recover any records from Secretary Clinton's server that we don't already have. Just as we appropriately processed the material turned over to the Department by former Secretary Clinton, we will appropriately and with due diligence process any additional material we receive from the FBI to identify work-related agency records and make them available to the public consistent with our legal obligations."

Clinton, Lynch, and Mills have not yet responded to our inquiries.