BREAKING: Appeals Court to Consider Making Hillary Clinton Testify on Emails

Similar to Rod Rosenstein's testimony to the Senate, the court discussed Hillary's emails on Tuesday.

This conveniently happened to be when the Black Lives Matter #blackout happened on social media.

Influencers and every day users only posted images of black squares to show their solidarity with the death of George Floyd.

However, the national unrest seemed to overshadow this major political story: Hillary Clinton could potentially be forced to testify on her emails!

Politico confirms this shocking development:

As a federal appeals court grappled on Tuesday with a politically charged dispute that long ago faded from the headlines, one of the most urgent and politically polarizing legal fights of the moment seemed to lurk just below the surface.

The official topic of Tuesday’s arguments before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals was Hillary Clinton’s bid to avoid giving an in-person deposition to a conservative group about the subject that dogged her during her 2016 presidential bid: her use of a private email account and server during her tenure as secretary of state.

However, some of the comments by judges and attorneys on Tuesday called to mind the ongoing battle royal over the Justice Department’s effort to abandon its prosecution of Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, on a false-statement charge, despite Flynn’s guilty plea in the case.

Both the Clinton deposition dispute and the Flynn case imbroglio involve an obscure type of legal mechanism that is not currently a household word but may soon be, at least in Washington: mandamus. It’s a process that can be used to force a judge’s hand when an ordinary appeal isn’t available for some reason or just won’t do the trick.

None of the lawyers or judges explicitly mentioned Flynn on Tuesday, but as the participants jousted over Clinton’s request, at least some seemed to be offering arguments shaped by the blockbuster fight over the attempt to unwind the guilty plea that Flynn offered to special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors more than two years ago.

While the Justice Department weighed in Monday with a full-throated endorsement of Flynn’s mandamus petition to shut down his prosecution, the department essentially sat on its hands after Clinton and her longtime aide Cheryl Mills filed similar petitions to block depositions that a judge ordered at the request of the conservative group Judicial Watch.

Last month, the appeals court judges assigned to the Clinton email case invited the Justice Department to appear at Tuesday’s arguments to explain its position. Department lawyers politely declined. Two days later, the D.C. Circuit panel affirmatively ordered the government to show up.

Some legal scholars suggested the Justice Department’s reticence was strange and perhaps even a political dodge aimed at diverting attention from the fact that it opposed a deposition from Clinton in U.S. District Court.

Justice Department attorney Mark Freeman was vague on Tuesday about exactly why it wasn’t backing Clinton’s move, but suggested that the rare rebuke to a judge was appropriate only in truly exceptional cases.

“We take very seriously the decision about when to come to this court and ask the court to issue the extraordinary writ of mandamus and we chose, in the interests of the executive branch, balancing the pros and cons, not to do so here,” Freeman said.

Of course, the government does file for mandamus to block judges in some cases and has not been bashful about doing so recently. In 2018, for example, the Justice Department filed such petitions to block court orders demanding testimony and records from Trump administration officials in connection with the adding of a citizenship question to the census. The George W. Bush administration also made a similar legal maneuver to block public access to details about Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force.

The Justice Department also rolled out the legal bazooka of mandamus on behalf of Trump himself, seeking to shut down a lawsuit that the governments of Washington, D.C., and Maryland brought alleging that he is illegally profiting from foreign and state government business at his D.C. hotel.

[...]

The arguments on the Clinton email case on Tuesday, held via telephone because of the coronavirus pandemic, stretched to more than an hour and a half. That was nearly three times more than the court had scheduled.

At least two of the judges assigned to the case seemed to suggest an uphill battle for the former secretary, first lady, senator and two-time Democratic presidential candidate by stressing just how infrequently mandamus is granted.

“Mandamus is an extraordinary remedy,” said Judge Nina Pillard, an appointee of President Barack Obama.

“Mandamus is extraordinary. It’s a rare device,” added Judge Thomas Griffith, who was appointed by President George W. Bush.

Indeed, this would be a massive blow for Hillary Clinton, as well as the former Obama administration.

A Clinton testimony under oath could potentially reveal corruption that Obama administration officials such as Joe Biden were aware about.

Recently declassified evidence regarding General Flynn, for example, appears to suggest that Joe Biden was aware of the unmasking requests.

It is unclear when we can expect a decision the appeals court, but it could come very soon.

Hillary's emails re-emerged into the spotlight in March of this year.

Of course, March was when COVID-19 began spreading rampantly across the nation, so the media hardly covered the story.

But in March, a federal judge ruled that Hillary must indeed testify over her emails.

Hillary is attempting to block the order, which is what the appeals court is currently mulling.

CNBC confirms the order of the federal judge:

Yup, her emails.

A federal judge Monday ordered Hillary Clinton to testify at a deposition for a lawsuit related to her use of a private email computer server for official business while working as secretary of State in the Obama administration.

The order to answer questions from lawyers for the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch pours yet more fuel on the longstanding fire of controversy over Clinton’s private server.

That controversy arguably dealt her Democratic candidacy for the White House in 2016 a fatal blow, and helped elect Donald Trump president.

“It is time to hear directly from Secretary Clinton,” Judge Royce Lamberth said in his order issued in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., where Judicial Watch is suing the State Department over its handling of searches for Clinton’s emails.

“As extensive as the existing record is, it does not sufficiently explain Secretary Clinton’s state of mind when she decided it would be an acceptable practice to set up and use a private server to conduct State Department business,” Lamberth wrote.

Lamberth’s order on Monday limits questioning of Clinton to “her reasons for using a private server and her understanding of State’s records management obligations.”

The judge barred Judicial Watch’s lawyers from questioning Clinton and her former chief of staff at State, Cheryl Mills, about the preparation of talking points for then-United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice’s Sept. 16, 2012, media appearances about the attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

No date has yet been scheduled for Clinton’s deposition.

Democrats have often mocked the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, but it appears that the Trump administration could have the final laugh.

Judicial Watch and other watch dog groups want answers into Hillary's handling of her emails and private server.

It's important that our leaders, even Democrat media darlings, are held accountable.