Why This Watch Dog Group Won't Let the Clinton Email Scandal Die

WASHINGTON -- More of Hillary Clinton's emails from her time as secretary of state will soon be made public. A federal judge has given the State Department until September 13 to begin releasing them.

These emails are part of the nearly 15,000 new emails uncovered by the FBI, showing the close links between Clinton's State Department and the Clinton Foundation.

The group behind their release is Judicial Watch, a small but influential watchdog made up of only about 50 people.

"We've been busy. It's a result of our perseverance and our litigation," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton explained.

"Judicial Watch is a non-profit, educational foundation. We're non-partisan," he noted. "We're neither Republican or conservative and our goal is to educate the American people about what its government is up to."

Fitton showed CBN News around Judicial Watch's D.C. office where a group of mostly lawyers and investigators were hard at work, nose deep in litigation.

"The great, old American system allows us access to the courts if the government doesn't turn over those documents, so the government is often times forced to turn over documents like the Clinton emails because we're in the courts," Fitton explained.

"JW is doing things in terms of getting info about the IRS scandal, about Benghazi, and of course the Clinton emails that Congress wasn't able to get or is uninterested in getting and the rest of the media isn't terribly interested in getting or is unable to get as well," Fitton continued.

Judicial Watch is scooping CBS' "60 Minutes," ABC's "20-20" and other mainstream media investigative units.

"I can't tell you how oftentimes we'll see something in the news that's extraordinary and people are talking about, but we're the only ones asking the follow-up questions to government agencies to find out the details," Fitton said.

And that goes for both sides of the aisle.

"We sued the Bush administration twice as much as we sued the Clinton administration. The Obama administration is a special case because they're completely opposed to transparency and fight us repeatedly so we've had to sue the administration hundreds of times to get access to government records," Fitton told CBN News.

Fitton offered this explanation for those skeptical about the timing of the release of these latest Clinton emails during this election season.

"She tried to suppress this for years; the cover-up unraveled," Fitton said. "A lot of the documents we're talking about with the foundation were given to the State Department by Huma Abedin in September 2015 and we're only getting them now?"

Fitton says we can expect more revelations in the days leading up to the election - and even afterward.

"We're going to keep on pursuing these Clinton emails. We're going to keep asking questions of the government, no matter who wins -- Trump or Clinton," Fitton pledged.

And that means fanning the flames to stomp out secrecy so in the end the American people don't get burned.