Judge rejects lawsuit over Clinton emails, calling issue ‘moot’

A federal judge has rejected an effort to force the federal government to take new, aggressive steps to recover emails from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

In a ruling issued on Monday, Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rebuffed a pair of conservative groups that said the federal government should sue Clinton to obtain the thousands of emails she sent through a personal account as secretary of State.

{mosads}The issue is “moot,” Boasberg said, because the government has “taken a number of significant corrective steps to recover Clinton’s emails.”

The conservative groups — Judicial Watch and Cause of Action Institute — claimed that the State Department and the National Archives had violated the Federal Records Act by allowing Clinton to use a personal email address routed through a private server.

To come in line with the law, they claimed, the government should sue Clinton to recover all of the work-related emails in her possession.

But the Obama administration’s multiple efforts to recover the emails — including coordination with the FBI, which has control of Clinton’s server — “are hardly the actions of a recalcitrant agency head or an uncooperative Archivist,” Boasberg said.

“Taken together, all of the recovery efforts initiated by both agencies up to the present day cannot in any way be described as a dereliction of duty.”

The State Department currently possesses roughly 30,000 pages of Clinton’s emails, which she handed over in late 2014. An additional 32,000 emails, which she claims were purely personal, have since been deleted.

The pair of conservative organizations “cannot sue to force the recovery of records that they hope or imagine might exist,” added Boasberg, who was appointed by President Obama.

The FBI is currently investigating Clinton’s use of a private server and email address, to determine if classified information was mishandled.

More than 1,300 of Clinton’s work-related emails that have been released by the State Department contain classified information.