Our effort to uncover the secrets of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s illicit email system took a major step forward this week.

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan granted us “discovery” into Clinton’s email system.  The order allows us to take testimony from former top Clinton State Department aides Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin and Bryan Pagliano.  The court also notes that “based on information learned during discovery, the deposition of Mrs. Clinton may be necessary.”  The discovery will take place over the next eight weeks.

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This arises out of our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking records of the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, former deputy chief of staff to Clinton.  The lawsuit was reopened because of revelations about the clintonemail.com system. (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363)).

In his Memorandum and Order, Judge Sullivan found that:

Judicial Watch raises significant questions in its Motion for Discovery about whether the State Department processed documents in good faith in response to Judicial Watch’s FOIA request.  Judicial Watch is therefore entitled to limited discovery.

Judge Sullivan also questions, citing Supreme Court precedent, whether the State Department and Mrs. Clinton “purposefully routed … document[s] out of agency possession in order to circumvent a FOIA request.”

Sullivan ruled that the scope of discovery includes:

The creation and operation of clintonemail.com for State Department business, as well as the State Department’s approach and practice for processing FOIA requests that potentially implicated former Secretary Clinton’s and Ms. Abedin’s emails and State’s processing of the FOIA request that is the subject of this action.

The judge also ruled that Clinton may have to testify:

Based on information learned during discovery, the deposition of Mrs. Clinton may be necessary. If Plaintiff believes Mrs. Clinton’s testimony is required, it will request permission from the Court at the appropriate time. [Emphasis in original]

The court authorized Judicial Watch to seek the testimony of the following witnesses:

1. Stephen D. Mull (Executive Secretary of the State Department from June 2009 to October 2012 and suggested that Mrs. Clinton be issued a State Department BlackBerry, which would protect her identity and would also be subject to FOIA requests);
2. Lewis A. Lukens (Executive Director of the Executive Secretariat from 2008 to 2011 and emailed with Patrick Kennedy and Cheryl Mills about setting up a computer for Mrs. Clinton to check herclintonemail.com email account);
3. Patrick F. Kennedy (Under Secretary for Management since 2007 and the Secretary of State’s principal advisor on management issues, including technology and information services);
4. Cheryl D. Mills (Mrs. Clinton’s Chief of Staff throughout her four years as Secretary of State);
5. Huma Abedin (Mrs. Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff and a senior advisor to Mrs. Clinton throughout her four years as Secretary of State and also had an email account on clintonemail.com);
6. Bryan Pagliano (State Department Schedule C employee who has been reported to have serviced and maintained the server that hosted the “clintonemail.com” system during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State).

During a court hearing on February 23, Judge Sullivan granted Judicial Watch’s motion for discovery into whether the State Department and Clinton deliberately thwarted FOIA for six years.  Judicial Watch then filed a proposed discovery plan on March 15 and filed a joint, proposed discovery plan with the State Department on April 15.

In a separate FOIA lawsuit concerning Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi terrorist attack, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that Judicial Watch can conduct discovery into the email practices of Clinton and her top aides.  Judge Lamberth ordered Judicial Watch to follow up with his court once Judge Sullivan issued his discovery order:

When Judge Sullivan issues a discovery order, the plaintiff shall – within ten days thereafter – file its specific proposed order detailing what additional proposed discovery, tailored to this case, it seeks to have this Court order.  Defendant shall respond ten days after plaintiff’s submission.

Both of these decisions are victories for transparency and accountability.  We will use this discovery to get all of the facts behind Hillary Clinton’s and the Obama State Department’s thwarting of FOIA.  The public can then be sure that all of the emails from her illicit email system are reviewed and released as the law requires.

For more, see the latest from JW on Fox News this morning.

We expect that testimony will begin over the next few weeks, so watch this space for updates.

U.S.-Funded Study: Mass Immigration from Mexico Ended, Border Enforcement Has Backfired

Last week we reported that Mexican drug traffickers help Islamic terrorists stationed in Mexico cross into the United States to explore targets for future attacks.  Among the jihadists who travel back and forth through the porous southern border is a Kuwaiti named Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir, an ISIS operative who lives in the Mexican state of Chihuahua not far from El Paso, Texas.

Even as this is happening, the Obama administration is creating in its own version of Alice in Wonderland.  Our Corruption Chronicles blog reports this week on an astonishing descent into the rabbit hole – funded by your tax dollars:

Mass immigration from Mexico has ended, an escalation of border enforcement has backfired, and the greatest need now is a path to legal status for the 11 million illegal immigrants who are already in the United States, according to a new study funded by the governments of both countries.  The findings could lead some to wonder what the taxpayer-funded researchers were smoking when they compiled this one.

It’s no joke, though.  Not only has mass immigration from Mexico ended, it won’t be coming back, according to the college professor in charge of this affair. His name is Douglas S. Massey.  He’s an Ivy League sociology and public affairs teacher who co-directs the Mexican Migration Project (MMP), which is partially funded by Uncle Sam through the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

With a headquarters in Guadalajara, Mexico MMP strives to further understand the complex process of Mexican migration to the United States.  Massey attributes what he has determined to be the end of mass immigration from Mexico to the “decline of Mexican fertility from 6.5 children per woman in the 1960s to around 2.2 children today.”  It’s time to shift from a policy of immigration suppression to one of immigration management, according to Massey and his fellow academics.

Their recent study is titled “Why Border Enforcement Backfired,” a collaborative effort between American researchers and their Mexican counterparts at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, a publicly-funded education center specializing in social science.  Besides the government cash that regularly flows to the MMP, the study itself got an infusion of taxpayer dollars from the NICHD, which operates under the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NICHD has a monstrous budget ($1.3 billion in 2015), and distributes quite a bit of money to causes that seem to follow leftist protocol.

In this instance the research found that “border militarization” has actually resulted in higher numbers of illegal immigrants coming to the U.S. from Mexico.  That’s because border enforcement has “affected the behavior of unauthorized migrants and border outcomes to transform undocumented Mexican migration from a circular flow of male workers going to three states into an 11 million person population of settled families living in 50 states,” this esteemed group of academics claim.  They argue that border enforcement emerged in response to “moral panic” about the perceived threat of Latino immigration to this country.  “The end result was a self-perpetuating cycle of rising enforcement and increased apprehensions that resulted in the militarization of the border in a way that was disconnected from the actual size of the undocumented flow,” the researchers found.

It gets better.

In a promotional announcement released by his university, Massey, the lead researcher, says this: “Rather than stopping undocumented Mexicans from coming to the U.S., greater enforcement stopped them from going home.” Here is his attempt to explain that absurd theory: “Greater enforcement raised the costs of undocumented border crossing, which required undocumented migrants to stay longer in the U.S. to make a trip profitable.  Greater enforcement also increased the risk of death and injury during border crossing. As the costs and risks rose, migrants naturally minimized border crossing — not by remaining in Mexico but by staying in the United States.”

Are we supposed to take this guy seriously?

In the meantime, the porous southern border has created a huge national security risk, and the region is a cesspool of violent criminal activity perpetuated by heavily armed Mexican drug cartels that have joined forces with Islamic terrorists to enter the U.S.  We have reported on this for years and in fact, back in 2011 cited a Texas Department of Agriculture report confirming that Mexican drug cartels have transformed parts of the state into a war zone where shootings, beheadings, kidnappings and murders are common.  More recently JW published an investigative series about Islamic terrorists operating camps in Mexico, just a few miles from the U.S. border and slipping into the country with the help of narco-traffickers.

Judicial Watch Lawsuit Uncovers More Hillary Clinton Emails

Despite the best efforts of Hillary Clinton, news this week from Judicial Watch shows that there are more Hillary Clinton emails at the Obama State Department to be uncovered.  We released new State Department emails (one batch of 103 pages, the second of 138 pages) that again appear to contradict statements by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that, “as far as she knew,” all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department and that she did not use her clintonemail.com system until March 18, 2009.

We recently released Clinton State Department emails dating from February 2009 that also call into question her statements about her emails.

The documents were obtained by Judicial Watch in response to a court order in a May 5, 2015, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against the State Department, after it failed to respond to a March 18 FOIA request (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00684)).  The lawsuit seeks:

• Emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013 using a non-“state.gov” email address.

Many of the documents predate March 18, 2009, go back as far as January, and were not turned over by Clinton to the State Department from her non-government server.  The emails cover topics such as: her schedule and travel plans; criticisms of Clinton by Richard Gere; Afghanistan; U.S. financial aid and security concerns for several Pacific Islands; the recommendation for a health care system overhaul; and “food security.”

Other previously unreleased emails are dated March 18, 2009, despite suggestions by Clinton that she had turned over emails with that date.  These emails refer to, among other things, her “friends at Planned Parenthood” and a call to Bill Clinton’s former National Security Adviser, the late Sandy Berger, who was convicted of illegally removing classified documents from the National Archives.

On October 16, 2011, Clinton sent a “confidential” backgrounder from former Ambassador to Malta Doug Kmiec (sent from his apparently unsecure server) to aides Abedin and Cheryl Mills. The email has since been redacted due to its classified nature. Specifically, Kmiec discusses sensitive persons and organizations working in the U.S. Embassy in Malta – the U.S. Maritime training program with the “AFM” (Armed Forces of Malta).

The Abedin emails include an exchange with Clinton’s former Deputy Chief of Staff Jacob Sullivan, in which Abedin suggests Clinton would often complain of being “exhausted”:

From: Abedin, Huma
To: Sullivan, Jacob J.
Sent: Thursday, April 16 18:54:22 2009
Subject:

I have to go to the dinner with her [state dinner in Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic]
I just got the I’m exhausted thing from her and Eugene [likely Eugene Bae, Clinton’s advance official] isn’t going to be able to tell Oscar de la Renta to shut up.

A March 31, 2011, email from State Department official Michael Hammer to Abedin and others shows yet another non-State.gov email address of HumaMAbedin[Redacted], which differs from the known Huma@clintonemail.com and HAbedin@hillaryclinton.com.

These emails further undermine Hillary Clinton’s statement, under penalty of perjury, suggesting she turned over all of her government emails to the State Department.  How many more Hillary Clinton emails is the Obama State Department hiding?

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly stated that the 55,000 pages of documents she turned over to the State Department in December 2014 included all of her work-related emails.  In response to a court order in other Judicial Watch litigation, she declared under penalty of perjury that she had “directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or are potentially federal records be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done.”  This new email find is also at odds with her official campaign statement:

On December 5, 2014, 30,490 copies of work or potentially work-related emails sent and received by Clinton from March 18, 2009, to February 1, 2013, were provided to the State Department.  This totaled roughly 55,000 pages.  More than 90% of her work or potentially work-related emails provided to the Department were already in the State Department’s record-keeping system because those e-mails were sent to or received by “state.gov” accounts.

Early in her term, Clinton continued using an att.blackberry.net account that she had used during her Senate service.  Given her practice from the beginning of emailing State Department officials on their state.gov accounts, her work-related emails during these initial weeks would have been captured and preserved in the State Department’s record-keeping system. She, however, no longer had access to these emails once she transitioned from this account.

The Associated Presspreviously reported that the State Department had received from the Department of Defense emails between Clinton and General David Petraeus that also predate March 2009.  Those emails have not been released to the public.

On August 10, 2015, Judicial Watch announced that the State Department submitted to the court a sworn declaration from Clinton regarding federal records on her controversial email system.  The declaration states:

I, Hillary Rodham Clinton, declare under penalty of perjury that the following is true and correct:

1. While I do not know what information may be “responsive” for purposes of this law suit, I have directed that all my e-mails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or potentially were federal records to be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done.
2. As a result of my directive, approximately 55,000 pages of these emails were produced to the Department on December 5, 2014.
3. Cheryl Mills did not have an account on clintonemail.com. Huma Abedin did have such an account which was used at times for government business.

The document is signed by “Hillary Rodham Clinton.”  The State Department was ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan on July 31 to request that Clinton and her top aides confirm, under penalty of perjury, that they have produced all government records in their possession and to return any other government records immediately.