Kerry sued over Hillary Clinton’s emails

United States Secretary of State John Kerry has been sued by a government watchdog group over Hillary Clinton’s government emails.

Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest legal organization, filed a suit on Thursday in a bid to force the State Department to collect all of the emails belonging to former Secretary Clinton from her tenure in government.

The group asked a federal court to order Kerry to obtain the emails from his predecessor. “Secretary Kerry is in cover-up mode for Hillary Clinton,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch.

The State Department and Clinton have been under intense scrutiny by a congressional committee which is investigating the 2012 attack on a US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, which led to the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

During her four-year tenure, Clinton kept her own email server in her home in New York and used an email address separate from the department. She turned over about 30,000 messages from her time as the secretary of state, but she erased another 32,000 messages she regarded as private and wiped her server to ensure they could not be recovered.

Clinton said she abided by the law, noting she had the power to decide what messages were official records and what were not, however, Judicial Watch argued that Kerry, as the agency’s chief, should decide about this matter as the records belong to the government not to Clinton.

Kerry has not reported Clinton’s strange arrangement to the National Archivist, the group said, arguing he is not complying with the law through not doing more or not trying to recover the emails.

“Defendant Kerry’s failure to notify the Archivist concerning the unlawful removal of the Clinton emails and failure to initiate action through the attorney general to recover the Clinton emails constitutes a final agency action for which there is no other adequate remedy in a court of law,” Judicial Watch said in a complaint, lodged in district court in Washington, D.C.

On May 22, the State Department released hundreds of Clinton's emails as the first batch of all of her emails that the State Department is reviewing for release.

The emails released “do not change the essential facts or our understanding of the events before, during or after the attacks," State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said.

The email controversy weighs down Clinton’s poll numbers, particularly on the question of reliability. She is the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

A poll conducted by Associated Press-GfK, showed that six in ten voters believe that the word "honest" describes Clinton only slightly well or not well at all.

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