A federal judge ruled on Wednesday in favor of one more search for Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

D.C. District Judge Amit Mehta ordered the State Department to search its servers for emails related to the 2012 Benghazi attack. In particular, they are tasked with looking for anything Clinton sent to aides Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, or Jake Sullivan at their state.gov addresses.

“Secretary Clinton used a private email server, located in her home, to transmit and receive work-related communications during her tenure as secretary of state,” Judge Mehta noted in his ruling. “[State] has not, however, searched the one records system over which it has always had control and that is almost certain to contain some responsive records: the state.gov email server.”

The ruling comes after the watchdog group Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit calling for a renewed search. The group argued that the State Department had only searched outside sources, such as Clinton’s private server.

Lawyers for the department countered that an additional search is unlikely to turn up anything else. In addition, it would set a poor precedent for any future requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Judge Mehta responded that “this matter is a far cry from a typical FOIA case” and that the email scandal was “a specific fact pattern unlikely to arise in the future.”

He then ordered the department to give him a status report by September 22.

Previously, Clinton and her three aides surrendered more than 30,000 emails to the agency in 2014. The investigation found 348 emails relating to Benghazi sent to or from the then-Secretary of State.

Any emails she deleted off her private server, however, may not have a backup and are likely gone forever.

In contrast, as a government agency, the State Department would have server backups in place. Department officials, though, have admitted that there was no automated archiving system in place during Clinton’s tenure.

The State Department did not comment on the ruling. Tom Fitton, president of the Judicial Watch, said in a statement, “This major court ruling may finally result in more answers about the Benghazi scandal–and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in it–as we approach the attack’s fifth anniversary.”

Clinton cites the “emailgate“controversy and then-FBI director James Comey’s subsequent investigation as major reasons why she lost the 2016 presidential election.

Delaney Cruickshank

Delaney Cruickshank is a Staff Writer at Law Street Media and a Maryland native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History with minors in Creative Writing and British Studies from the College of Charleston. Contact Delaney at DCruickshank@LawStreetMedia.com.

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What do an anonymous Facebook spokesperson and John Podesta have in common? Answer: they both should have brushed up on their “undo send” reflexes. Recent reports reveal that Clinton’s campaign manager and the social media behemoth both made recent regretful email screw-ups.

According to an extensive New York Times report, the hacking of tens of thousands of Podesta’s private emails (which were repeatedly used by the GOP as ammunition against Clinton’s trustworthiness throughout the presidential election) hinged on one single typo from one of Podesta’s aides.

Typo by Clinton aide saw illegitimate written as legitimate. Led to Russians accessing email of campaign chairman https://t.co/5PiDjMHrYj pic.twitter.com/I6uCr8yeyd

— darren (@darrenpauli) December 13, 2016

When Podesta was sent a suspicious phishing email to his personal account asking him to reset his password on March 19, his aides had sense enough to forward the message to a computer technician before clicking the “change password” button.

“This is a legitimate email,” Charles Delavan, a Clinton campaign aide, replied. “John needs to change his password immediately.”

Unfortunately, Delavan knew the email was a fraud and meant to type that it was an “illegitimate” email, and even worse, that email hailed all the way from Russia. His flubbed recommendation allowed for Russian-affiliated hackers to compromise and publish Podesta’s entire archive.

But Hillary’s chairman wasn’t the only victim of email issues this week.

A Facebook spokesperson accidentally sent an email that was  intended for a colleague to a Buzzfeed News reporter that called President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed Muslim registry a “straw man.”

According to Buzzfeed News, Facebook had failed to respond to comment requests on major tech companies’ pledge “not to comply with practices that could be used to target people or build databases based on their religious beliefs.” However, in the email, the PR rep calls this “attacking a straw man.” Here’s the quote:

Happy to talk to her off record about why this is attacking a straw man. Also I heard back from her that she may or may not write an additional piece depending on what response she gets from companies. So sounds like not making any stmt on record is the way to go.

This email error inadvertently became Facebook’s first “pseudo-public” comment on the proposed registry.

Other companies like Twitter, Google, GitHub, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Pandora, Giphy, and Slack have all publicly stated that they wouldn’t assist in the creation of a registry if asked, but Facebook has not officially commented on the issue yet.

However, a Facebook spokesperson did reach out to BuzzFeed News to say: “No one has asked us to build a Muslim registry, and of course we would not do so.”

So in short, the moral of the story is simple. If you want to avoid typos that could possibly threaten your candidate’s political future or sending haphazard internal memos to inquisitive reporters, triple check your emails before you hit send.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

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